The Gillespie Country Fair

by Marc Hess

  “Quit.” Mari shook her head. “It’s all our secret. And it ain’t no secret anymore.”

  Carel sat back and let the chorus of cicadas fill the silence between them. The glider bench squeaked a bit.

  “You know I’ve been trying to get back to Willow.”

  Mari nodded—not like she believed him, but more like she was just listening to him.

  “I know I have a lot of ground to cover, and I suspect tonight put an end to all that. Suspect I lost Willow for good. Wondering if you could—”

  “What? Mr. Land and Development can’t find a way to buy your way out of this one?”

  “I got nothing, Mari. Stuck my neck out too far. This time the bank got it all.”

  She seemed to find that amusing. “Really? You?”

  Carel nodded. “I’m dead broke. That truck isn’t even mine anymore.”

  Mari was chuckling.

  “What?”

  “Well, you probably stand a better chance with Willow now.”

  He scrunched up his eyes.

  “Money got in your way, Carel,” she shot at him. “It wasn’t just your daughter. An’ me. Or even Max.” She looked like she wanted to spit. “All you Geisches ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of goat farmers. Nothin’ good happened when y’all had money. Just look at—”

  “Okay.” Carel held up his hands. “That’s enough.”

  They stopped talking for a while, but they both knew they were not done.

  Carel spoke up first. “You remember that note we took out on this place when I was just getting started?”

  “I didn’t do nothing. That was all you.”

  You signed it! he almost said, though it wasn’t his place right now to be accusatory. “Well, the bank’s got that, too.”

  She took a minute to digest that one. With the moon on her face, he could see her wince. “Oh, God in heaven, Carel. You taking me down with you?” Mari put her face in her hands, but Carel knew she was too tough to cry. She just sat there bent over, shaking her head.

  He wanted to reach out to her, put his hand on her shoulder, reassure her, but he didn’t dare. Most likely she’d throw a punch at him. And like she’d said, he didn’t want to get his ass kicked a second time that night.

  “Listen, Mari. I know this place is everything to you.”

  She raised her head to him, clear-eyed. “You ain’t taking nothing from me, Mr. Geische. But Willow?” She threw a sarcastic laugh at him. “Some ‘historical renovation’ guy you turned out to be. Made a mess outta your daughter’s own heritage.” Then she got up and went back in her house.

  Evening Prayers

  “Well, I think I’m just going to have to burn this house down to the ground.” Mari spoke with the offhanded tone she would use if she were going to plant some geraniums in the window box. Her old high school friend Chuck Schrubb had called from the bank, saying she would soon be kicked out of her house because she’d been so dang stupid back in the day, when Carel got her to sign off on that loan note so he could get his dang building company started up. “What on God’s green earth was I thinking?”

  But she knew what she was thinking at that time. She had a little baby to take care of, her dad was drooling himself to death in a nursing home, and she was just doing everything she could to keep her husband around. And trying to get rid of him, all at the same time.

  “It’s just the one dwelling and the lot it sits on,” Chuck had told her on the phone. “The rest of the land and the other buildings are clear of any financial encumbrances. Your Sunday house and the outbuildings are not included in this deed of trust.”

  “Deed of what? It’s my house, Chuck. It’s where I was raised. It’s where I raised up Willow. It’s not some … whatever you called it.”

  “I know that, Mari. That’s why I’m calling. I want to give you the first opportunity to pay off this loan. I know it looks like a lot of money, but I am willing to help you find terms that we both could work with. However, the bank will need to get a good down payment, and we would have to move quickly.”

  “Carel ain’t got no money at all, then?”

  “No, ma’am.” Chuck’s tone was apologetic. “The old Geische Land and Development company has nothing left.”

  “I wasn’t askin’ about his company, Chuck. I was trying to figure out if Carel could help out any.”

  Chuck let out a deep sigh, the kind that foreshadows bad news. “No, Mari. He’s got nothing. My bank made certain of that.”

  • • •

  Those one-hundred-degree days were full of accusations and foul tempers. Never before had Mari and Willow been so stuck with each other, languishing in the air-conditioning, making iced tea, and getting on each other’s nerves. The heat stopped them from getting anything done, and unresolved issues hung over them like an unmade bed.

  “Well, you’re the one who fucked it up” was Willow’s flat-out response.

  “Language, please.”

  “I’m supposed to be getting married, stepping up to do my part in keeping this family going, and you, Mom …” She just balled up her fists and made a growling sound.

  “Sweetheart, I was just—”

  “You screwed up your marriage, that’s one thing.” Willow threw herself on the sofa. “And now you’re screwing up mine!”

  Cautiously, Mari sat herself on the sofa just out of Willow’s reach. “Willow, darling, don’t you worry about what happens to this house. If you love that boy, you go on and marry him.”

  Willow was shaking her head. “Love? Is that what you thought it was when you married my dad? Or when you were carrying on with my real dad? Whichever one was which.”

  “Am I supposed to have some excuse ready for that? I can’t undo what’s already been done, now can I?”

  Willow was shaking her head. “It’s never about love, Mom. It’s like this now: I need a place to stay. That ain’t love.”

  “If you’re referring to your fiancé, sweetheart, it’s a whole lot different. He’s a fine catch for you, Miss Willow. Stable kind of boy from an old family in town, and a great body—I mean, like, a nice, muscled-up guy, a hardworking man.” Mari reached forward, kissed two of her fingers, and then tenderly placed them on Willow’s cheek. “But I didn’t think I raised the kind of girl who would say yes to someone she didn’t think she loved.”

  Willow winced and backed away from her. “Oh, Mama. How come nobody really gets it? Ryan is ambitious enough, but he ain’t got nothin’. Soon as I say ‘I do,’ he’s got himself this here farm an’ you get to see my kids running down that back pasture to Palo Alto Creek down there. But nothin’ like that is gonna happen now, is it? In Gillespie County, marriage is no different than a real estate deal.”

  Willow stood and walked upstairs to her room, the hottest room in the house, where Mari knew she would go through a slow-motion act of getting ready for an evening with Ryan. Blue jeans and a selection of tops would soon be strewn across her bed.

  Mari wandered out onto the front porch for her evening prayers. That was Willow’s term for the frequent occasions when her mother would sequester herself on that old porch glider—sometimes with a beer, sometimes with one of the trashy novels she was always reading, and sometimes with just her anxiety and her tears. But it would always be in the evening, and Willow always left her alone out there. Mari could spend hours out on that porch by herself, gnawing on her fingernails and mulling the things that she had no control over. On occasion she would be struck by some profound insight, and she’d go hunting down Willow to share her revelations. One time it was the color she’d chosen for the kitchen window curtains. Another time it was how to pay for the repairs on her old Jeep.

  A little while later, Mari found Willow up in her room, sitting on the chair in front of her mirror in a T-shirt, brushing out her hair. “Mind if I come in?”

  Willow just kind of shrugged her shoulders but said nothing as Mari moved aside some clothes and stretched herself across the unmade bed. Nothing was said for a
long while. The Band-Aid was off Willow’s ring finger, and the little pink scabs showed with every stroke of the brush. Each woman studied the reflection of the other’s face in the mirror.

  Mari broke first. “When I was just about where you are now,” she started saying, “I was up here in this very same room.” She paused. Willow’s hairbrush did not miss a stroke. “It got all screwed up, right out of high school.”

  Willow turned to her. “You don’t have to go digging through the past. I’m not one to be passing judgment on anything you might have done back in the day.”

  “It’s not all about that ‘back in the day’ stuff. This is about you and me right now.” Mari sat up on the side of the bed. “I can’t see how you can come to understand your place here when I haven’t been completely honest with you.” She left another long pause, took a loud breath, and added, “That’s what I realized just now.”

  “Evening prayers?” Willow muttered as she turned her face to the mirror and started to powder the shine from her cheeks. She kept a cold eye on her mother.

  “If what happened … Anyway, who could you trust except …? Well, the three of us had been such close friends growin’ up. Carel, Max, and me. But that ‘best friends forever’ stuff, well, that changes when ya get older and get … horny, I guess. Changes all of us. Carel got to me first, and you know he don’t let go of nothin’. And like you were sayin’ downstairs, it had nothing to do with love and everything to do with needing to have something to own. Like property. Yes, we were a thing, and then there was Max left on the outside looking in. All hollow and empty, just like you seen him the other night.”

  Willow was studying her mom’s face at the same time she was trying to apply a steady streak of eyeliner.

  “We’d get to fighting, Carel and me, and we’d be kind of on again, off again. You always do, because you think it might be about love. Anyway, one time, when we was off again, Max smelled that blood in the water and came ’round for me. I let him. I welcomed it. I was glad for him at the time. One short night, at the exact right time of the month, you know? It wasn’t even about me either. He just did it to get one up on Carel, and that split the whole thing wide open. The fight thing was just about them two horny bulls going right at it, but it ended up I was the one carryin’ the baby. And that baby was you.”

  Mari wanted Willow to say something, but she didn’t. Mari waited a moment before she continued.

  “Then Carel … It was kinda queer. I thought he’d come back and beat me up or something. But he come back on his knees and begged to make an honest woman out of me.” She gave a little forced laugh. “Carel wasn’t doing it for me. Figured this part out much later. He just couldn’t let Max get the last say. It all blew up like nothin’ you ever seen. And that put Max Ritzi out on the road again. His old man found out, ’cause no one can keep a secret ’round here, and he was gonna kill him for it. So Max was on the run.”

  Willow had stopped with her makeup but still had nothing to say. The quiet pulled up around them like the August heat. Mari stood as if to leave, but instead she came over to Willow and messed a bit with her hair. Willow let her.

  “Carel and me, we got married real quick. We had you. Tried to make it work, but what did we know? That one quick lay cast a long shadow over the whole thing, and we just couldn’t get out from under it. ’Til now.”

  Mari ached for her daughter to say something, but Willow just sat there contemplating herself in the mirror, holding a lost, sullen look, like she’d just heard her biopsy came back positive.

  Then Willow’s chin dropped to her chest. “So that’s what it’s gonna be like for me.” It wasn’t a question.

  Mari was startled. “What scares me most, sweetheart, is that all these little secrets—secrets and lies—have all come down on you.” She reached out and took her daughter’s hand, gently tracing the marks that marred Willow’s ring finger, kissing them. “These are my scars too, sweetheart. I put them there just as much as you did.”

  “It’s not like something I do all the time, Mom. Not like it’s a hobby or something.” Willow raised her face. “I don’t have any control over it. It just happens.”

  “I know, I know,” Mari said, as though soothing a child who had just skinned her knee. “I don’t care what you done—that’s behind us.” She paused and gave a smile. “Now, that sounds like something you were just saying to me, don’t it?”

  Willow pressed tight on her lips and bobbed her head.

  “I really can’t tell which one of us is raising the other anymore.” Mari shrugged in surrender. Then she drew in a breath, collected herself, and said, “I better let you get cleaned up. You gotta start all over, and your beau’s gonna be showin’ up here pretty soon.”

  When Ryan’s truck rumbled through their gate, it pulled a cloud of caliche dust up to the house. “Evening, ma’am. Hot enough for you?” A southern gentleman, he gave no hint of their encounter at the South Star the other night.

  “You can call me Mari, Ryan. I’m too young for you to be ma’am-ing me.” She was looking at him somewhat differently, trying to pierce that polite, good-looking veneer to see his devil’s horns. “How’s your oma getting on? Is she adjusting to her new home?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Doin’ well.”

  “You been calling on her regular?”

  “Well, I been kind of—”

  “It’s hard moving into a nursing home. Your oma needs you, you know.”

  “Yeah. I hear ya. I’ll be visiting with her after church this Sunday.”

  “You be sure to do that.” Mari smiled coyly down upon him. “And do give her my regards.”

  “I will, ma’am. I mean, Mrs. Mari.”

  Mari imagined that he and Willow would be going out to do some dancing at Luckenbach, where the boys took her back in her day, then they would end up drinking way too much at the South Star, like she always had.

  Willow came bounding onto the porch, all smiles and done up for the evening: ass-tight jeans, tank top, cowboy boots, and dangling from her neck, a silver cross she’d taken from Mari’s jewelry box without asking. She had a fresh Band-Aid around the finger where Ryan hoped to see his engagement ring, and she brought with her a Shiner Bock fresh from the fridge, handing it to her mother.

  “We’re off, and don’t you worry if we don’t make it home tonight.” Willow placed a kiss on Mari’s forehead. “We’re, you know, almost legal.”

  Willow slipped her arm through Ryan’s and turned him toward his truck. Turning with her, Ryan spoke loud enough for Mari to hear. “I kinda like your mother.”

  At the truck, he held open the door for her, and she shot a glance back to Mari, still sitting in the porch glider with the cold beer in her hand, smiling. It was a mutual smile, Mari thought, that only a mother and daughter could translate.

  The truck cruised down her long driveway toward the swelling lights of the town. Just out of spite, Mari called after them, “Don’t lay my daughter tonight.”

  • • •

  A kid goat stood on the hood of a white Honda Accord on the corner of Llano and Main streets, oblivious to all the honking and shooing going on around him. The Honda’s driver had left his door wide open and was out in the street, waving his arms and imploring the dim animal to get off his car. His gesticulations only got the baby goat to prance up his windshield and hoof about on the roof. The driver slapped his forehead with both hands as he stomped in desperate little circles in the middle of the town’s main intersection. Traffic was plugged up in all directions under a signal light that dutifully flashed from red to yellow to green and back to red, with no effect on the mayhem below.

  The way Carel figured it, the Honda with out-of-state plates had right-turned into a pickup hauling a crate of pygmy goats, spilling them into the intersection.

  A city cop was on his knees along with the goat owner, trying to cajole another kid out from under a delivery van. Caught up a block away, a Gillespie Country sheriff’s car had left its lights fl
ashing, and Deputy Ortega ran between the rows of stalled vehicles toward the scene, his right hand on his holster as he hollered into his walkie-talkie.

  From the way the shoppers on the shady side of the street jumped back, Carel knew there must have been another goat running down the sidewalk. This was the first time he’d laughed since the bank had locked him out of his office.

  Under his summer straw Resistol, and toting an overstuffed leather briefcase, he had come downtown to wrangle around with his former tax accountant. He now stood on the sidewalk with a crowd of rubberneckers who were enjoying the Main Street goat roundup.

  An old friend of his Uncle Victor stopped when he saw Carel. “That’d be ol’ man Lang’s goats out there,” the old crony volunteered. “That last big bang was that there white car smashin’ into Lang’s goat crate. I heard it all. Don’t know where he is, but that’s his wife out there workin’ to get the kid out from underneath. Can’t remember her name. Think it all started with that first truck up there.”

  Carel stepped into the street and marched up to the old Ford pickup, askew across two lanes, with the words Geische Custom Framing barely scraped off the door. Old man Lang’s goat truck was embedded in its rear fender, and Willow sat in the driver’s seat. She had just come from work—still wearing that old German dirndl and her hair pulled back.

  “I was just going to the bank to cash my payroll check.” She seemed to be apologizing to Carel, before switching to tattletale anger. “That asshole pulled out in front of me.”

  There was yet another car, pushed into the grill of Willow’s truck. Steam from its smashed radiator hissed in the breeze. A city cop was there too, dutifully taking information from a short lady hidden behind a big straw beach hat and sunglasses that covered most of her face: the perpetrator of the whole mess.

  Carel peeked around the front of the hood. “Looks like she got the worst of it. But you won’t be able to drive this out of here.” He turned back to see the fragility behind Willow’s stony mask—her gathered brow and pursed lips. “You’re going to be okay, sweetheart. Nothing here can’t be fixed.”