The Wedding Tree

by Robin Wells

  “Son of a gun,” he said. “There is something here.” He pried up an extraneous piece of cardboard, then handed it to me. “Here—you do the honors.”

  I lifted the cardboard and glanced at the top photo. It was the profile of a man in the driver’s seat of a shiny car, a car like you might see in an old Bogart movie. My heart tripped.

  “Who is it?” Matt asked.

  “Gran’s first love.” It was taken at a distance, but he was handsome, all right. Light hair, a dazzling smile, a muscled arm resting on the rolled-down window of an old sedan. He wore a buttoned short-sleeved shirt, and even though it was a black-and-white photo, I could tell he was tan.

  “Why’d she hide his pictures?”

  “She said she didn’t want my grandfather to see them, but I think she was mostly hiding them from herself. I don’t think she ever got over him.” I swallowed. “And . . . I don’t know. From the way the story’s going, I think a family skeleton is about to be revealed.”

  I looked at the next picture. It was the same man in another short-sleeved shirt, at a closer viewpoint. This time he was lying in the grass, his hands behind his head, grinning at the photographer, his eyes warm and lively. Something about him made the hair on my arm stand up.

  “Hey—are you okay?”

  I glanced up and met Matt’s concerned gaze. “Yeah. I just . . .”

  . . . think I might be looking at my grandfather.

  Matt leaned over my shoulder and looked at the picture. “He looks familiar.”

  Yeah. Real familiar—as in like my mother. Like me.

  I swallowed and mustered a smile. “I think I might pass out from the fumes of my own funk.” I straightened and stood. “I’d better get inside and let Gran know I saved her photos. And you’d better change clothes and get to wherever you’re going. Thanks so much for your help.”

  “Glad to assist.”

  The fact he was being so nice about this when he’d been such a dick about me just being in his bedroom was disconcerting—so I did what I usually do when I’m disconcerted. I rambled. “I meant what I said—I’d like to pay your cleaning bill. And I promise to come back and pick up all the packing peanuts on your lawn, and . . .”

  He held up his hand. “Don’t worry about it. The lawn service is due to come this morning. They’ll get all that.”

  “But . . .”

  “Seriously. It’s not a problem.” He peered at me. “You sure you’re okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “I’m fine.”

  It wasn’t a ghost I’d seen, I thought as I scurried across the lawn and up Gran’s porch.

  It was my own eyes staring back at me.

  17

  adelaide

  I lay my head back in my rocking chair and closed my eyes. I could hear Hope outside, talking to a man. I couldn’t make out the words, just the low rumble of his voice, along with the sound of his laugh. Wasn’t there a handsome widower in the neighborhood? There used to be. Seemed like there was another one now. I wondered if he was attracted to Hope, and vice versa. Wouldn’t that be something, if sparks flew between them?

  Those man-woman sparks. Oh my, how powerful they could be! Astonishing, really, how much energy those sparks consumed, considering how little time, in the big scheme of things, people spent actually making love. But oh, how it colors everything—and how strong that pull can be!

  Stronger than the need for food or sleep, back in the day. Stronger, even, than my need to sleep now, which seems to constantly pull at me like a deadweight.

  Best not to think about dead, I tell myself.

  Although, now that I know the dead are floating, the concept of a deadweight doesn’t really apply. I opened my eyes and looked up at the ceiling. I’d heard Mother, but I hadn’t seen her since I’d been home. I wondered if dead people watch us.

  “Not all the time,” Mother’s voice promptly answered. “Only when you call us with your thoughts, or when you have a shining moment.”

  “Oh.” I made a mental note to get better control of my thoughts.

  “Course, we don’t see as you do,” Mother continued. “We see through all the external stuff, straight to the beautiful you.”

  “There’s a . . . beautiful me?” Mother had never been much on praise. She’d thought it might give me a big head and make me vain.

  “It’s not ladylike to fish for compliments,” Mother sniffed now. “And there’s certainly no excuse for ever letting yourself go, but I’ll tell you this, young lady: all those times you fretted about a little blemish or a couple of pounds or a wrinkle—well, that was just plain nonsense. Up here we only see your beauty, because that’s the truth of you, and God’s truth is always lovelier than an earthly mind can imagine.”

  “Oh, how wonderful!”

  “What’s wonderful?”

  Hope’s voice made me open my eyes. I saw three of her standing in the doorway. The three Hopes settled into two. I stared, confused, and then I remembered—I see multiples of everything lately.

  I hadn’t seen even one Mother. Had I been dreaming, or had she really talked to me again?

  I decided to go with the less-crazy-sounding explanation. “I must have dozed off.” I straightened in my chair, crinkling my nose against a fetid smell, and squinted until the two Hopes merged into one. Her shirt was smeared with something wet and green, and her shorts were covered with grime and something that looked like coffee grounds. “Good heavens, child—did you fall into a trash bin?”

  “Pretty much.” She looked down at her clothes, her mouth turned down with chagrin. “I had to do a little garbage-truck diving, but I managed to save your pictures of Joe.” She handed me a stack of photos.

  My heart quickened as my fingers closed around them. “Did you look at them?”

  She nodded. “He was movie-star handsome.”

  “Yes. Yes, he was.”

  “I want to hear all about him, but I need to get cleaned up first.” She pulled her wet T-shirt away from her skin and looked down at it with disgust.

  I wasn’t about to argue. She reeked like a shrimp trawler’s net. “Go right ahead, dear.”

  I sat back and slowly sifted through the photos, my heart rat-a-tat-tatting in my chest. There was Joe, holding a fish. Me holding a fish. Joe building a fire. Joe in a canoe. Joe shirtless and dripping wet. A photo of us together, taken at arm’s length—what I’d heard Hope call a “selfie.”

  I grinned as I gazed at those photos, a sweet ache growing inside me. You’d think I’d be past sexual desire, and for years now, I haven’t had too much interest. In fact, I’ve sometimes wondered what all the fuss was about, even though I remembered the strength of the urge. Seeing these photos of Joe, though . . . well, I know it’s hard for young people to hear this about old people, but you never move totally beyond desire. It’s like chocolate—once you’ve had really good chocolate, the very thought of chocolate, when you dwell on it, makes your mouth water. And lovemaking with Joe had been chocolate heaven.

  I was staring at a photo of a shirtless Joe lying in the grass, when Hope reentered the room. I looked up from the photo and felt my face heat, as if I’d been caught looking at pornography.

  She settled into the chair beside me. She smelled like soap and shampoo, and her hair was damp. “You were telling me about Joe getting you out of work and trying to convince you to go to Mississippi.”

  I nodded.

  “Did you go?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you have a good time?”

  Oh my! I’ve lived seventy-plus years since then, yet no period of time stood out as clearly as those three days. They were wrapped in sunshine, so bright it almost hurt to look at them. Maybe that’s why I’d so seldom fully reflected on them. I settled back and closed my eyes, letting the brilliance heat me from the inside out, and lapsed back into s
torytelling mode.

  1943

  There I was, sitting in a bright blue Ford De Luxe sedan—a car with three windows on each side, rounded fenders, and a funny, snubbed trunk—flying along Highway 11, the wind blowing the tail of the blue and green chiffon scarf wrapped around my hair like a kite. Joe had borrowed the car from his tailgunner’s father. “You’ve been flyin’ my son two miles up in the air over enemy territory,” Joe said the middle-aged man had told him. “Reckon I can trust you to drive my Ford to Mississippi and back.”

  It was a beautiful April day, clear and bright and unseasonably warm, and I felt like springtime personified—young, alive, full of rising sap. We joked and laughed and sang out-of-tune accompaniments to the radio, our spirits in perfect harmony. I felt like Katharine Hepburn—free and daring and larger than life, too wild to be confined by anything as stuffy as convention.

  My next clear memory is of pulling into the parking lot of the Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Coldwater, Mississippi. We were late—the parking lot was full, and everyone was already inside—but Joe took my hand and led me into the squat cinderblock building all the same.

  One thing the obituary hadn’t mentioned was that “Uncle Leo” was black. We walked through the door and stood out like two flour-covered thumbs—so out of place that the soloist, a large woman wearing a wide veiled hat decorated with black cloth roses, stopped in mid-lyric.

  It was odd enough for white folks to attend a Negro’s funeral back then, but it was even more unusual for a young white couple from out of state to attend the funeral of an elderly Negro man—a man who’d lived in this town of less than five hundred souls all his life and, as we later learned, never ventured further than two counties over.

  The room rustled as the entire congregation turned and stared. Joe smiled, nodded, and lifted his palm in a little wave, as if it were perfectly normal for everything to grind to a halt just because he’d entered a room. The soloist nodded and smiled back, then resumed singing with renewed vigor. The mourners took a little longer to finish staring at us, but they turned back around in time to dutifully sing, “Ain’t that grand!” to the call-and-response line of a hymn about laying down swords and shields.

  One song followed another for a good half hour. The music was alternately heartbreaking and rollicking, accompanied by an out-of-tune piano. The mourners swayed in time to the beat, occasionally breaking into riffs and adding extra “Amens” to the endings.

  At last we were allowed to sit. I could see a plain pine box at the front of the church, with a single wreath of carnations atop it.

  A minister in a sharply tailored black suit took the pulpit behind the coffin and pointedly welcomed us, then launched into a hellfire and brimstone sermon without a single word about the deceased. “Uh-huh,” “Praise God,” “You tell ’em, Brother” and other bursts of encouragement from the congregation punctuated his relentlessly fiery diatribe.

  After the service—which went on for two full hours, and included a mandatory “viewing” of the gray-looking, emaciated old man in the coffin—a middle-aged woman dressed head to toe in black made a beeline toward us. “Thank y’all for coming.” She clasped both my hands, then Joe’s. “How’d y’all know Daddy?”

  “We, uh, didn’t.” Joe squeezed her hands. “But your father helped my granddaddy out of some kind of scrape when he was young. Never would give us the details, but he said your father was a hero. He saw the obituary in the paper, and he insisted we come and pay our respects.”

  “Oh my.” The woman released her grip on Joe to clasp her hands to her chest. “You don’ say. Ain’ that won’erful! Why didn’ he come hisself?”

  “He couldn’t.”

  “Whyever not?”

  Joe looked her straight in the eye, his expression somber. “He’s in an iron lung.”

  I nearly laughed out loud. Joe stepped on my toes as a warning.

  “Oh mercy! So sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s okay. He’s over a hundred years old and he’s ready to meet his maker.”

  “Well, it’s so nice he sent y’all to pay his respects.” She turned to a large woman beside her, similarly clad for mourning, and grinned like a kid who’d just gotten a new bicycle for Christmas. “Roberta, these here people say Daddy done somethin’ good!”

  As it turned out, apparently Uncle Leo had been a meanspirited old goat and his family had been concerned about his afterlife destination. They were thrilled to learn he’d had a generous moment, no matter how long ago or vague, and they insisted we join them for lunch at the home of one of his daughters. They fed us pulled pork, black-eyed peas, smothered greens, and cream pies until I thought the buttons on my dress would pop.

  “We did those folks a world of good,” Joe said after we’d finally taken our leave.

  “We lied to them.”

  “We made them feel better about Leo.” He headed back onto the highway.

  “It was still a lie.”

  “The world isn’t like your newspaper photos, Addie girl. Not everything is black and white.”

  “Black-and-white photos happen to have lots of shades of gray,” I pointed out, meaning that gray things were made up of black and white, negating his argument.

  “Exactly,” Joe said, as if I’d just agreed with him.

  The conversation drifted to lighter topics, but I filed his remarks in the back of my mind to discuss later. We talked about family—I learned his father had left his mother shortly after he was born, that his mother had died when he was fourteen, and that he and his older sister had been raised by an aunt in California. He deflected most of my questions by asking about me. I chattered away like a magpie. I told him my father was a parish judge, and my brother, Andy, worked as an analyst for the War Department in Washington, D.C., and he was more like a distant uncle than a brother because he was so much older and I hardly ever saw him. I told him about the rest of my family and Wedding Tree and even Charlie.

  We drove all afternoon, stopped around dusk at a diner for sandwiches, then drove another hour before turning off the highway onto a dirt road. It was black as pitch, and the tree frogs sang a loud, nighttime chorus. The road grew narrower and narrower, the tree branches scraping the sides of the car. I thought for sure we were lost, when the headlights finally lit up a little cabin. It was unpainted clapboard, and it had a ramshackle, untended look to it.

  Joe kept the headlights on while he rummaged around a rocking chair on the porch and pulled a key from under the left back rocker. He opened the screen door, then unlocked the oak one behind it.

  A musty smell fluttered out. “The place could do with an airing,” he said, stepping inside and flipping on the light. “But it’s clean. Hank’s father hires a local lady to come in, change the sheets, and dust every month.”

  “Even when no one comes here?”

  “Yeah.”

  What a luxury to be so rich, I thought, following him in. The inside was neat as a pin, but just as worn as the outside—two cracked, worn leather chairs and a plaid, saggy sofa sat against unfinished wood walls. The kitchen opened directly off the living room. Corkboard covered one wall and was covered with clippings of faded, yellowed newspaper. I leaned in and looked at the date on one. “This is from 1902!”

  Joe nodded. “Hank said this place belonged to his great-granddad, and he used to come here as a kid. They added an indoor bathroom a few years ago.” He gestured toward the back. “It’s in the back, by the bedroom.”

  I froze. “The bedroom?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I—I thought you said there were two bedrooms.”

  “I said you’d have your own bedroom,” he replied. “I’ll sleep on the sofa out here.” He carried my bag into the room, which featured a rustic metal bed meticulously made up with an old, faded quilt.

  He set down my suitcases and grinned at me as I stood frozen in the doorwa
y. Tension stretched between us. He patted the mattress. “Come try it out.”

  “I wonder if I can trust you,” I said, only half jesting.

  “Are you really worried?”

  “A little, now that I know how easily lies roll off your tongue.” I tentatively sat on the edge of the bed.

  “At the funeral?” He plopped down beside me and leaned back against the wall, his arms behind his head. “Those weren’t lies. That was fiction.”

  I shot him an arch look. “What’s the difference?”

  “The reason behind it. A lie is when you’re telling an untruth for your own benefit. When you’re doing it for the good of someone else, it’s just a story.”

  “That’s a very questionable line of reasoning, because any untruth—even about terrible things, like murder—can help someone.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Well, a murderer is protecting his parents when he says he didn’t do it, because they’re bound to grieve having reared such an awful son.”

  “It’s always wrong to cover up a crime.”

  “Every crime? Because it’s probably a crime to take a civilian up in a government plane.”

  He grinned. “As I recall, I didn’t tell any untruths about that. Besides, no one was hurt. I like to think I helped make a dream come true.” He looked at me, and our gazes locked. His voice lowered to a goose-bump-making rumble. “I’d like to make all your dreams come true, Addie.”

  From another man, it would have seemed like nothing but a line—a prelude to seduction. The way he looked at me, though—that all-the-way-through-to-my-soul, I-really-see-you-and-I-think-you’re-wonderful look he gave me—lifted it to a different level. So did what he did next.

  He rose to his feet and headed to the door. “It’s late. You should go to bed. Fishing is a crack-of-dawn activity.”

  “We’re really going to fish?”

  “Sure. We want to eat, don’t we?”

  He pulled the door closed.