“Liar! He’s not there now. Funny it should be a Negro. The only Negro I ever really knew was the girl who kept house for us in Texas after Mama died. Her name was Josephina. The Reverend never allowed her to speak in his presence. And I don’t think I’ve seen one ever in Galen.”
“Why don’t you tell him to go away if you don’t like him watching you?”
“I do like it. He’s here for a reason. Like the song.” She began to hum, “…comin’ for to carry me home…”
“Stop it!”
“Remember that night, Darcy?”
“What night?” I said, but I knew.
“The night you came home from reform school.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
She bunched up the pillows so that she could lean her elbows on them. “We’ve got to talk about it. And now. Because after I’m gone, there won’t be anybody left you can talk about it with. Unless you plan on telling Luca.”
“I’d never tell him.”
“Why? He’d never tell on us.”
“He wouldn’t understand. He’s like you. He thinks people are better than they are. And he’s so disappointed when he finds they’re just as rotten as everybody else.”
“You’re probably best off not telling, I guess. He’s too honest for his own good. A lie like that would eat at him. How well do you remember that night?”
“It’s not something a person’s likely to forget. I mean the body was two days old and getting gamy by the time I got home.” I didn’t like the turn the conversation had taken, so I took up a pile of socks and tried to match them.
“Where’d you put him, Darcy?”
“In the orchard,” I said. I couldn’t seem to find the mate to a navy blue one. “There’s a spot where the earth was soft. Too soft, maybe. Twice I caught Old Sam sniffing around the spot and once he started digging and I had to chase him away.”
“Do you know what happened that night, Darcy?”
She was looking at me sharply now with none of the morphine haze that sometimes dimmed her eyes. I wouldn’t look up. “No, and I don’t care.” It was some years now since Jesse had made his grand entrance into our lives and it felt like a hundred.
“Well, what do you think happened? In all these years, you must have formed some idea.”
“I figure you and Jesse had a fight and you killed him. He was such a little turd, it wouldn’t have taken much to do him in. Then you panicked and sent a message to me.”
She looked suddenly disappointed. “Don’t you remember what I told you that night, before you dragged him away?”
“You said, ‘I want you to know I didn’t do it.’”
“Well, didn’t you believe me?”
“No. I did not.”
“I’m telling you I didn’t do it.” She was getting herself all worked up now, and I wished there was a way to stop this talk, but it had been coming on too long.
“Then who did?” I asked flippantly. Maybe I was still holding a grudge. Even now, it galled me to think how I’d had to leave the Schuylkill County School for Wayward Girls in the middle of the night without even a chance to say goodbye to the librarian.
Jewel didn’t answer right away, still hurt that I had never believed her. Then she opened her mouth to speak, closed it, opened it again, and said, “Reverend Hamilton did it.”
Too shocked to react, I could only let my mouth hang open like an idiot.
“Reverend Hamilton killed Jesse,” she repeated.
“How?”
“He pushed him and—”
“I don’t mean how’d it happen. I mean why’d it happen?” I tried and failed not to be angry at a sick woman, but thinking how I’d gone to all that trouble to cover up for a man whose guts I’d always hated was more than I could swallow gracefully.
“It wasn’t really his fault,” Jewel was quick to say. “He didn’t mean to do it. It’s just one thing led to another.”
“What things?” I asked, tight-lipped.
After a deep sigh, she began. “Me and Jesse were fighting as usual. After you were gone, he got real bossy, tried to make me give him money. But I knew he just wanted money so as he could leave. Oh, stop looking at me like that. I’m not the first woman who ever acted like a fool because she was afraid of being left. Anyway, we were fighting the night Hamilton came and he walked right into the thick of things. Jesse told him to get out, but Hamilton wouldn’t go until he’d said what he’d come to say. And oddly, it was you, Darcy, he’d come to talk about.”
“Me?”
“Yep. He said maybe he hadn’t been fair to you the way he’d acted about Aaron getting cut and all. He said, upon reflection, it was probably more Aaron’s doing than yours. Said he’d found out something that made him realize that. He thought maybe you were better off in reform school and away from the inn and Galen, that if you were given a decent upbringing, you’d grow into a fine young woman, and if I was any kind of mother, I’d use the time you were away to rid myself of all the evil influences around the inn, starting with bloodsuckers like Jesse. Well, Jesse took offence at that, naturally, and he said it was you, Darcy, who made all the trouble and that you were just no good, and the best thing for everybody would be if you never came home.”
She began coughing then and I went to get her water. After a few sips, she said, “I couldn’t let him say those things about you, my own child, and I turned on him like a snake. I said Reverend Hamilton made sense about getting rid of him, and I wanted him to leave that very night. That was when Jesse went crazy. He smashed every lamp in the room, and the girls came running up to the landing, but I told them to go back to their rooms and not come out again that night, no matter what they heard. Then Jesse grabbed me by the throat, and I thought he was going to break my neck. But the reverend came up and made him let me go. That’s when Jesse hit him, which wasn’t right because the reverend had twenty years on Jesse. I thought he’d never get up when Jesse knocked him down, but he did. Got up finally and hit Jesse right back. It wasn’t a very solid punch, no force to it and poorly aimed. Which is why the reverend and I just kept looking at each other when Jesse didn’t come back at him again. Then we saw the blood running out the side of his head, and we knew he’d hit something going down.”
She stopped talking then and bowed her head like she was in church, I guess in reverence for the deceased, but I felt no such reverence, and I wanted to hear the rest. “And then what happenened?”
“Everything got very confusing after that. The reverend was so shaken I had to get some liquor into him, and I was in no condition myself to be comforting him. He missed his mouth and spilled liquor all down his shirtfront. ‘My God, my God,’ he kept saying, ‘I’ve killed a man.’” I didn’t say a word because I was almost as scared as him. He said we should get a doctor, but we both knew it was too late for that. Then he came up with the worst idea of all. He wanted to go for the sheriff, and you know how nervous police and clergy make me, and to have both under my roof at the same time would have been more than I could stand. I had to think fast. I told him if it got out, he’d be ruined. And seeing as how he hadn’t meant to do it, there was no reason for him to tell anybody. Poor man. He just kept nodding his head up and down like a woodpecker and running his fingers through what hair he had left. ‘What shall I do?’ he kept repeating. I thought I’d go mad if he said it one more time. So I told him to go home and not say a word to anybody. I’d take care of everything. That’s when I sat down and wrote my message to you. I waited for the postman next morning, and I gave him twenty dollars to see to it that my letter got to you right away. I knew you’d know what to do, Darcy. You always know what to do.”
I laughed soundlessly. The spit in my mouth tasted of bile. To her death, Jewel would never know quite what to do about anything.
“I’m sorry I sent that letter, Darcy. I ought never to have dr
ug you into it, except that I knew you’d take care of it better than any of us could.”
“I’m glad you did,” I said. “I can only imagine where we’d all be today if you hadn’t. What I can’t understand is why you’d risk everything you had for a man who lived to make trouble for us.”
She twisted her bed covers in her hand and said, “I can’t really explain that even to myself. It just seems like when you try to decide who’s bad and who’s good, it’s too tangled to figure out. I mean if the reverend hadn’t wanted to talk about your upbringing and then if he hadn’t unwound Jesse’s fingers from my throat, none of it would’ve happened. And Jesse wasn’t always a son of a bitch. Sometimes, he’d make me laugh and laugh. But once Jesse was dead, there was nothing I could do for him, but I could help the reverend and he needed help badly. I’ve done plenty of things I’m ashamed of, but I have never refused a human being my help. And it’s always come back to me, the help when I needed it, because the world is round.”
What the shape of the world had to do with anything escaped me but I knew that that had been as close to an explanation as Jewel would ever get. So I gave up on that particular line of questioning and instead asked something that had me curious. “Do you suppose Jesse’s dying was why the reverend killed himself?”
“It couldn’t have helped but I don’t think that’s the reason. I saw him a couple of months before he hung himself. He sent me a message by way of his housekeeper to meet him out in the orchard. He looked awful that day, pale and sweating. He said, ‘I’ve done terrible things, Jewel. I’ve killed a man, but I can live with that. What I can’t live with is that I’ve raised a boy who’s done worse than killing.’ Then he said that I should keep Aaron away from you because there was something about you that stirred up all the evil in him. I took offense at that because it was like he was saying it was your fault. So I said, ‘Why don’t you keep Aaron away from Darcy?’ and he said, ‘I will as long as I can.’ And that was the last I ever saw him alive.”
“What could Aaron have done worse than killing?” I wondered aloud.
“I don’t know. But killing yourself is just as bad. It’s outside the natural order of things and puts a big rent in the universe.”
I rolled my eyes, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“In a way, I’m to blame for Hamilton’s dying. I never wanted to confess. I never needed to. I figured God sees everything you do, and that’s enough. But he needed to confess, and I should have let him.”
“It’s all over with now anyhow.”
“Is it? I don’t think anything is ever over once it happens. It’s just like an echo down a well. What if someone takes a notion to dig up the orchard someday looking for Jesse?”
“You don’t ever have to worry about that,” I said, unable to keep from smiling at my own cleverness. “Before I buried him, I took off his pants and jacket and I put them on and his helmet too. I’d watched him start his motorcycle a hundred times, so it wasn’t hard to figure out. I took it up on the ridge and waited most of the day until I saw Mrs. Hennessey come out. I waved to her from up there with the helmet on, so she couldn’t see my face. She didn’t wave back naturally, just walked off in a huff, but I knew she’d seen me. She don’t miss a trick. I know she told everybody she could about it. She loves to be important and knowing something nobody else did must have given her a little thrill. I left his motorcycle in back of a diner on the highway and pulled out some wires so it wouldn’t start. It looked like he’d broke down and maybe got a ride with a trucker. Then I buried his clothes and his helmet and walked back hell for leather through the woods in my slip, hoping nobody saw me. Nobody did. If the body ever does turn up, they’ll never know it’s his.”
Jewel looked at me wordlessly. “You’re scarin’ me a little bit.” She paused again thoughtfully. “You know I wonder sometimes why Aaron’s the way he is. I wonder if he was born like that or if something made him that way. Maybe the reverend beat the devil into him while he was trying to beat it out of him. It’s like what come first the chicken or the egg.”
We stopped talking after that, and as the afternoon turned to evening, I watched Jewel’s eyes close and went to pull the sheet up over her shoulders so that she wouldn’t catch a chill. She stirred. “Sit by me, Darcy,” she said, “just until I fall asleep.” I pulled up a chair and felt her take my hand to lay against her cheek. “Such warm, rough hands,” she said, and I could feel that she was smiling in the encroaching darkness. “Don’t grieve for me when I’m gone.”
“I won’t,” I said. “I’ll be too mad to grieve. It’s fine for you. Dying doesn’t mean anything to you. You don’t believe in it. But I believe in it, and when you’re gone, I’ll be left alone, all by myself, until I get so old, I lose all my teeth and can’t chew food. Then I’ll starve to death.”
She laughed softly. “You’re so dramatic. It won’t be as bad as all that. You’ll still have Luca.”
“Like hell, I will. Once you’re gone, he’ll hop on the first boat back to Italy.”
“Then tell him you love him. You do love him, don’t you, Darcy?”
I was glad for the dark. I could have never answered otherwise.
“What’s the difference? It’s all ruined anyhow. I don’t blame him. I did it. He could have loved me once. But not anymore.”
She laughed again. “All ruined? Just because the puppy dog love you might have had together is gone, doesn’t mean it’s all gone. You’ve got to be grateful for the love that’s left. It’s ruined love. But it’s still love. You still have that. I see it in his eyes when he looks at you.”
“I think the morphine is stimulating your imagination. What you think you see in his eyes is as real as that Negro by the door.”
“I pity you, Darcy, you know that. You love him from hell to breakfast, but you can’t say it and you can’t show it. Your love just sticks in your throat like a chicken bone. It must have been torture for him to be around you all these years and never know, and worse for you to be around him all this time and never tell. Why do human beings torment themselves so?”
Old Sam jumped on the bed and curled up at Jewel’s feet. He’d never done that before. Usually he’d just lay down at the bedroom threshold, near to where Jewel said the Negro was waiting. I made to push him down, but Jewel said to let him be.
That afternoon was to be the last time I spoke to my mother. My mother. How strange the words sounded to me. Jewel. An innocent right up to the end. A child. A gentle and beautiful child who the world had bloodied but never made bitter. How could she have possibly ever been anyone’s mother? But she was, had been, a mother, second to none. A mother who had found the best in each of us, mined it, and never made us feel the lack of what we would never have to give. She was, after all was said and done, my mother, though I never called her anything but Jewel, and the next day, she died in my arms.
It was a glorious day, the first sunny one in what seemed like endless days of rain. Luca was in the orchard tending the trees. I didn’t have to tell him. I could see in his face what he had seen in mine, the knowledge that made him lean so heavily on his spade. “It’s over,” I said. “She’s gone.”
He didn’t say anything, just closed his eyes. Finally, he said, “I’m sorry, Darcy.”
And I said, “Thank you,” and had started back to the house, when his hand touched my shoulder. “Let me help with the funeral,” he said.
“That’s all right,” I said. “I’d rather do it myself. It’ll give me something to do.”
His eyes fell back to his spade then, and he went back to his work, and I to the house. It never occurred to me that he might have needed to help me even if I didn’t need help, that perhaps he was already missing Jewel as much as I was. It just never occurred to me.
It turned bitter cold the day of the funeral and Caroline showed up looking like something out of a magazine, complete with black-veil
ed hat and gloves. Over her dress, she wore a fur coat that must have cost her lawyer husband the proceeds of a major lawsuit. Even Jolene breezed in from Philadelphia, where she had won a scholarship to keep going to school.
It was a simple service conducted by a minister Caroline had brought with her from Connecticut over my objections. Jewel had never thought much of churchmen or churchgoers and I didn’t think it fitting to have one at the funeral. But Caroline said it wouldn’t be proper, and I gave in to her who had developed a mortal fear of being improper. Her husband took us all to the service in his big black car that must have been a mile long. During the service, he kept taking his watch out of his pocket every five seconds and looking at it like he had a train to catch.
The minister talked for a while by the graveside in a very general way since he had never met Jewel, and then we all threw a rose onto the lowered coffin. I watched Luca drop his rose and thought I’d never seen anyone look so stricken. When it was over, I felt disgusted with myself for letting Caroline take over like she had. And I asked if anyone would mind if I read from a book I’d read to Jewel in her last months. It was not really a question and I didn’t wait for a response. I just took out my Rubaiyat: “Then said another—surely not in vain my substance from the common earth was ta’en, that He who subtly wrought me into shape should stamp me back to common earth again.”
The minister had a hissyfit and said it wasn’t right to read pagan verse on such an occasion. So for spite, I followed up with: “Ah, with the grape my fading life provide, and wash my body whence the life has died, and in a windingsheet of vineleaf wrapt, so bury me by some sweet gardenside.”
Walking back to the car, Caroline’s husband took her arm and the minister took Jolene’s. I hoped Luca might offer me his arm, but he walked by himself a little ahead of the rest of us with his hands in his pockets. And so, I walked alone.
Back at the inn, Jolene left right away. She had to get back for some examinations, she said over her shoulder as she swept out the door. Luca went upstairs to change his good clothes and Caroline and her husband proceeded to ransack the house under the guise of collecting mementoes of Jewel.
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