News of the Spirit

by Lee Smith

  MAMA WAS A GREAT COOK. SHE ALSO LOVED TO TALK on the phone, and during the next weeks, I strained to overhear any mention of Carroll Byrd. I got plenty of material. But since Mama generally stayed home and was the recipient rather than the purveyor of news, it was sometimes hard for me to figure out what had actually happened.

  “She what?”

  “You’re kidding! Why, those rugs are worth a fortune! That furniture came from England!”

  “Oh, he did not!”

  “Well, that is the strangest thing I have ever heard in my whole life. The strangest!”

  “You’re kidding!”

  Et cetera.

  I had to decipher the news: Carroll Byrd had given away the downstairs furnishings and the Oriental rugs to several distant relations, who showed up in U-Hauls to claim them and cart them away. Then she fired the housekeeper. She hired Norman Estep, a local ne’er-do-well and jack-of-all-trades, to knock down the walls between the kitchen and the dining room and the parlor, and paint everything white, including “that beautiful paneling.” (“Have you ever?”) Next, several huge wooden crates arrived for Carroll Byrd from Maine, and Norman went to the train station and picked them up in his truck and took them to her house.

  For Carroll Byrd was a painter, it developed. Not a housepainter, of course, but the other kind—an artist. The minute I heard this, a long shudder ran from the top of my head to my feet. An artist. Of course! She had decided to stay on in her father’s house because she loved the light down here as spring came on.

  “The what?” Mama asked, puckering up her mouth as she talked on the phone to Jinx’s mother. “I mean, it’s light up in Maine, too, isn’t it?”

  Well, yes, but Carroll Byrd feels that there is a special quality to the light here in Virginia that she just has to capture on canvas. So now Norman Estep is building frames, huge frames, for her canvases. And now he’s going all around to junkyards for pieces of iron, and now he’s buying welding tools at Southern States Supply. For her sculptures—turns out she’s a sculptor, too. Newly elevated to a position of importance by his privileged relationship with Carroll Byrd, Norman Estep is grilled mercilessly by all the women in town, and clams up. Now he won’t tell anybody anything. Neither what she’s painting, nor what she wears, nor what in the world she does out there all day long by herself. Norman Estep buys groceries for her in the Piggly Wiggly, consulting a list penned in a stark angular hand. He won’t even tell anybody what she eats! He is completely loyal to Carroll Byrd.

  But the women turn against her. They drive out there to welcome her, two by two, carrying cakes or pies or casseroles or congealed salad, to be met cordially at the door by the artist herself, who does not ask them in. She responds politely to their questions but does not initiate any topics herself. Finally, in some consternation, the women turn on their heels and lurch off down the long walk, but not before noticing that she’s made a huge mess of the patio—why, it’s got an old iron gate and pieces of junk from the junkyard piled right in the middle of it, some of them welded together into this awful-looking construction that Mama swears is a human figure but Jinx’s mama says is no such thing—and not before seeing that Carroll Byrd’s gotten Norman Estep to plow up all that pretty grass in front of the house for a big vegetable garden, of all things! No lady has a vegetable garden, and no person in their right mind would put such a garden in front of a nice house, anyway. (“Lovely home,” Mama always says.)

  Several weeks after accepting the food, Carroll Byrd sends Norman around to deliver the plates and containers back to their original owners, each with its terse little thank-you note attached, written on fine creamy paper with raised initials.

  This paper seems to make Mama madder than anything yet. (“I’ll swear! It’s certainly not like she doesn’t know any better.”) By then it is clear to all that Carroll Byrd is determined to be as much of a hermit as her father was, even more of one, and in the way of small towns, everybody stops badgering her and even begins to take a perverse pride in her eccentricity. “See that long driveway goes right up that way?” a visitor might be told. “There’s a world-famous woman artist lives up there all by herself. Never goes past the gate.”

  BUT MOST PEOPLE, INCLUDING MAMA, FORGOT ABOUT Carroll Byrd as spring turned into summer and more recent events claimed everyone’s attention. Susan Blackwelder had a miscarriage, then fell into a depression; old Mr. Bishop retired and then sold his downtown Commercial Hotel to two young men from Washington who were reputed to be “homos,” which interested me, naturally, and led to some fascinating observations. Best of all, Miss Lavinia Doolittle knelt but never rose from taking Communion at the altar in the Episcopal church on Palm Sunday. She died with her wafer in her mouth. I loved this, and was furious that we had missed it by attending the eleven-o’clock service rather than the nine-o’clock, just because Mama always said nine o’clock was “too early for God or anybody.”

  Still, I didn’t forget about Carroll Byrd. I rode my bike about once a week all summer long, with time off for camp and Bible school and the beach. I’d usually find her outside, wearing a halter and cutoff jeans, working in the garden with her braided hair wound on top of her head. She was brown as a berry, strong as a man. The garden thrived, with shiny red tomatoes and big-leafed tropical-looking squash plants and enormous sunflowers that nodded on their stalks like happy idiots. I could have stepped right up and spoken to her, and often I thought I would, but somehow I never did. One time she put a plateful of fresh vegetables from the garden on a table outdoors and set up an easel to paint them. I couldn’t see the painting, but I could see her face: dire, ruthless, beautiful.

  It stayed with me all summer while I went off to 4-H camp and then Camp Nantahala and then to Virginia Beach with my mother and Jinx and Jinx’s mother. Virginia Beach was loud and bright and fun, though Jinx and I were dismayed to find that a boy from our very own class back in Lewisville, Buddy Womble, was staying down the beach, and would not let us alone. He liked to sneak up on us while we were lying out in the sun with little wet pads of cotton over our eyes, as suggested by Teen magazine. “Gotcha!” Buddy Womble would holler, kicking sand, which stuck to our baby-oiled arms and legs and made us look like sandpaper girls. Then he’d run off down the beach laughing his big fake laugh, “Har-dee-har-har,” at the top of his lungs. Jinx and I hated him. We went spying on his cottage one night and were appalled to witness Buddy’s fat father, sitting alone on the porch, bury his face in his hands and sob as if his heart would break. This violated every known rule of conduct. Men were not supposed to cry, especially not fathers. “Yuck,” Jinx mouthed at me, her round white face like a horrified little moon in the shadows. I felt my own heart drop to my feet in a long, sickening fall. The next day, we were a lot nicer to Buddy on the beach.

  Our mothers played bridge and went on a gin-and-tonic diet, which meant that they walked up and down the beach a lot with insulated plastic tumblers in their hands. Jinx and I won cheap jewelry by throwing softballs at stuffed cats in the amusement park, rode rented bikes, and drank some gin of our own with three girls from Durham, North Carolina, who had stolen it from their parents. We bleached our hair with lemon juice. We got real tan, and did not burn our eyelids. The weather was perfect every day except for the last one, which dawned rainy, and so we packed up and drove home early to surprise our daddies.

  They would be at work, of course, when we got there. Mama dropped Jinx and her mother off first, then let me out at home and went on to the grocery store. I let myself in with the key and took my bag upstairs to my room, which looked smaller now, a baby’s room. I put my bag on the bed and turned to the mirror and then stopped still, in shock—I almost failed to recognize myself! My bleached blond hair, grown out longer than it had ever been, curled all around my dark face, which looked different, too…thinner, not so babyish.

  I raced outside and got my bike out of the garage and rode off to see Carroll Byrd. It was a drizzly, humid August day; I was covered by a fine mist
of rain, like my own sweat, by the time I turned down her lane. I rode until I reached the hedge where I always hid my bike, then slipped behind the farthest boxwood, looking toward the house.

  But I went no closer.

  For there, parked right in front, was Daddy’s car, the familiar big gray Oldsmobile with the AAA and Rotary Club stickers. Even from where I was, I could see his old canvas hat stuck under the back windshield.

  I waited and waited. At first I thought, Oh well, Daddy’s her lawyer. This is a lawyer visit. Then I stopped thinking anything, as gradually it came over me. I didn’t move a muscle. I stayed behind that boxwood for one hour and forty minutes by my watch, and then dodged back to the hedge and got my bike and rode home. When I went to bed that night, after Mama’s special supper and Daddy’s big hello, my arms and legs ached and ached, as if I had run a race, or climbed a mountain.

  I NEVER RODE MY BIKE TO CARROLL BYRD’S HOUSE again. But the horrible thing was that I didn’t really blame Daddy. I could see why he would love her. For in a sense, Daddy was like her: a loner, an observer, an outsider…despite the fact that he’d been born and brought up in Lewisville, despite the fact that he was doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing and had been at it for decades.

  Daddy had run the mill, Dale Industries, since he was only twenty-eight years old, when his own father killed himself.

  One day I asked Daddy to tell me about this. We were down at the mill, in the very office where my grandfather had done it. It was after hours, and Daddy was trying to finish up some paperwork, at the same desk where his father had kept the gun in the bottom drawer. “Why?” I kept asking. “Why did Granddaddy shoot himself?”

  But all Daddy would say was, “Oh, Jenny, honey, there are pressures, circumstances, that you can’t possibly understand at your age”—the kind of response that infuriated me. I went right out in front of the mill and broke the aerial off Daddy’s car, then lied about it. I said it had been done by some kids in a blue van with Ohio tags. Daddy always underrated me. As a future novelist and student of the human soul, I knew a lot more than he thought I did. I was capable of understanding anything he had to tell me.

  I alone understood that Daddy was a hero, a tragic figure. He stood six-foot-three and looked like Gregory Peck, with a rangy body, a prominent nose, dark thick hair, and sad gray eyes that seemed to see everything. Perhaps to make up for his father’s lapses, Daddy was the most responsible man in the world. He worked harder than anybody I have ever seen, involving himself not only in the daily business of the mill but also in the lives of the families who had been working there for generations: tirelessly attending funerals, weddings, graduations, wakes. My mother rarely went with him to these events, as she had “better things” to do, and also found “those people” depressing. Daddy served on every board in town and belonged to every organization, or so it appeared to me.

  He also took care of my mean old grandmother and my shy maiden aunt Chloë, who lived with her, visiting them nearly every day. Aunt Chloë had had polio, and leaned to the left as she walked. My grandmother Ernestine Dale enjoyed absolutely nothing as far as I could see, except television; Daddy had bought them the first set in town. Grandmother claimed to watch only the quiz shows, calling them “educational,” but in fact she watched that television all the time. She had trained Aunt Chloë to hop up and turn it off the moment a visitor arrived on the porch; by the time Aunt Chloë had let the visitor into the parlor, my grandmother would be reading the Upper Room or the Bible.

  Oh, she acted simpery-sweet, but she didn’t fool me for a minute—she was a fake, an old bitch. I didn’t like her and she didn’t like me much, either, complaining that I was a “tomboy” and a “roughneck,” criticizing my nails, which I bit to the quick, and trying to convince me that I should like Charles Van Doren better than Elvis Presley. My grandmother was a fool! She wore big black dresses and smelled like Mentholatum. I used to put baby powder in her tapioca and rearrange everything on her night table whenever I went to her house, so she would think she was going crazy.

  I felt sorry for Daddy. He had to take care of Grandmother’s and Aunt Chloë’s affairs as well as our own; he also had to shepherd his other sister, my silly aunt Judy (that’s Judy Dale Tuttle Miller Hall), in and out of one crazy marriage after another, while back at home he had two daughters to raise and then me (the surprise). Daddy had his work cut out for him. He had a beautiful wife who required a lot of coddling and catering to, something I’d always assumed he enjoyed, but after my observations of Carroll Byrd, I realized that Mama was too soft, too sweet, too safe for Daddy, like one of those pink satin pillows on her huge unmade bed. A man could sink down in there and never get out.

  Now I saw Daddy as stifled, smothered by all that pink. I saw him as a restless cowboy in Grandmother’s parlor, as a hawk among knickknacks.

  No wonder he loved Carroll Byrd.

  I still loved her, too; and in a way, I felt, this love brought me closer to my father, though he didn’t know it, of course. But I was trying to stop, out of loyalty to my mother and also because I knew that Carroll Byrd would never love me back. She’d never even know me. The affair would not last long—these things never did, I told myself.

  Anyway, I was used to loving people who didn’t love me back. After all, I’d been in love with Tom Burlington, my sister’s husband, for years and years. Three years, to be exact, but it seemed like an eternity.

  MY SISTER CAROLINE DID NOT DESERVE TOM BURLINGton. I couldn’t imagine how she had tricked him into marrying her in the first place. My grandmother always called Caroline a flibbertigibbet; and for once, I agreed with her. Caroline was simply too bouncy. She wore everybody out. Of course she was a cheerleader at St. Catherine’s, of course she was “Most Popular” in the yearbook; of course she was president of her class twice in a row at Hollins before transferring to Carolina in her junior year, where of course she pledged Tri Delt. She made solid B’s and majored in elementary education. Caroline had a bouncy ponytail, boundless enthusiasm, and the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen. By Christmas of her senior year, she was engaged to Tom; right after graduation, they got married.

  Caroline’s wedding was the biggest event in our family that I could remember. My oldest sister, Beth, had married quietly (in the Little Chapel of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church) before moving to California, where her young husband had gotten a very good job in the computer industry, which nobody had ever heard of. She had one child already, and was expecting another. I didn’t know Beth at all, though I’d always felt that I’d like her, because of the sweet way she held her baby in the photographs she sent home. And when she and her husband came east for Caroline’s wedding, Beth was the only person thoughtful enough to bring me a present: a silver ring with a turquoise flower. (I cried and cried when I lost it in the lake at Camp Nantahala the following summer.)

  I was the youngest bridesmaid in Caroline’s wedding. I got to wear a white organdy dress with a pink satin sash, a picture hat, and pearl earrings. I got to carry a bouquet of pink rosebuds and baby’s breath. I even got to wear Cuban heels—my first high heels ever—over my grandmother’s objections. She said I was too young. My mother said, “Oh, Ernestine, I’m sure you’re right,” and let me wear them anyway. I looked perfectly beautiful at Caroline’s wedding, much prettier than Caroline herself, who was a bit too wholesome for white. Caroline looked like a nurse.

  But her groom, Thomas Burlington, looked like Troy Donahue. He was the handsomest boy I’d ever met, and the nicest, possessing all of Daddy’s sensitivity without the aloofness.

  I had been predisposed toward him anyway, after Mama’s discussions about him on the telephone: “Well, he doesn’t have a penny to his name, but he’s real smart, he’s gotten all these scholarships…. Oh yes, we like him. You can’t help but like him…. He’s got a master’s degree in English literature, have you ever?…Well, I don’t know. Teach school, I reckon.” Mama’s tone betrayed what she thought about teaching scho
ol, and I was sure Caroline held the same opinion. A schoolteacher would never be able to support Caroline, not even the cutest schoolteacher in the world, which Tom was. He didn’t know what he was getting into. (Though they did receive so many wedding presents that they could have sold them off and lived for a year or two on the proceeds, it looked like to me.)

  The wedding reception was held at our house, under a huge white tent set up in the backyard. In the house, the wedding presents were displayed in the family room and the downstairs guest suite, a sea of silver, china, and crystal. I had earlier pocketed a nifty jade paperweight sent by one of Tom’s relatives that nobody had ever heard of, to keep as a souvenir.

  I started loving Tom Burlington at the wedding reception, and never stopped. The party was all but over. Tom and Caroline had cut the cake, made the toasts, and everybody was dancing to terrible music (Percy Faith). Caroline had gone upstairs to put on her “going-away outfit.” My feet were killing me. I shifted from foot to foot to keep my heels from sinking into the grass as I waited in the front yard, clutching my net package of rice, wishing I hadn’t gotten so grown up all of a sudden, so I could run down the road playing tag with my little cousins.

  “Why don’t you just take them off?” There was Tom at my elbow. He pointed to my shoes.

  “Oh, I’m fine,” I said. “Just fine. I wear heels all the time,” I said.

  “I was just thinking of taking my own shoes off,” Tom said. “In fact, I believe I will.” He stepped out of his loafers and leaned down to peel off his socks. He had changed to a seersucker suit with a white shirt and a striped tie.

  “Me too, then.” My feet sank into the cool thick grass.

  “And now, Miss Jennifer, I wonder if you would do me the honor of accompanying me to get another bite of that cake,” Tom said formally. “There’s plenty of time. You know how long it takes your sister to get dressed.”