by Amber Foxx
“I don’t think he can walk or he’d have come home,” Mae said softly. “He sure took a long walk to get here.”
“Or got chased, or dropped. Hawk. Dog. Who knows?” Ronnie gently scooped the protesting cat into the carrier. “Come on, Priv, little buddy. I’ll get you fixed up.”
As they walked back across the dry grass, through the cool mossy-smelling shadow of the church, Ronnie asked, “So how’d you know this, Mae? You psychic?”
She looked at the wounded cat. She’d saved his life. And Ronnie, a widower with no family, seemed fonder of his great brood of cats than she’d ever realized. “Yes, I am. When things call for it.”
“They sure called for it now. I’m going straight into Cauwetska to Doctor Hassel. You’re okay walking home?”
“Of course. I hope Priv is okay.”
“I hope so too.” Ronnie set the carrier in the passenger seat, turned to Mae, and shook her hand with both of his. “Thank you.”
Ronnie hadn’t blinked. He hadn’t judged her, doubted her, condemned her—none of that. He hadn’t been nosy or awed like some of the people at CVU. His warm acceptance of her gift, after the reactions she’d gotten elsewhere, came as more of a shock than if he’d said she was crazy. After he got in the Caddy and drove off, Mae stayed put.
Giving her mind some space to soak up what had happened, she strolled among the graves. Now what? She’d shown and acknowledged the sight, and he’d believed her—someone in her town. The mayor. Would it change anything? It didn’t seem likely. People were set in their ideas. Tylerton wasn’t exactly a place of change.
Most of the graves she stopped by were Tylers or Ridleys, the two oldest families in Tylerton. Somehow Mae had managed to marry first into one, and then into the other. She paused at a Tyler grave scabbed with golden crusts of lichen. James MacArthur Tyler, 1848-1864. Mack was MacArthur Tyler. She’d found him and saved him at least a night of exposure, maybe a drunken self-shooting. One less Tyler in the ground.
Hubert Dearborne Ridley, 1810-1903. Some people never left this town. Maybe if your name was Hubert Ridley and it was all over these old stones, you really couldn’t. Maybe if your family had the oldest house in town and the oldest name, even if none of you lived like some grand old southern family the way some Tylers tried to, you had to stay. A live oak had begun to send roots into this ancient Hubert Ridley’s resting place. Perfect. The living namesake had roots.
Someday her Hubert would be here, and Jim and Sallie. Sallie would probably rather use the old cemetery on the farm but you couldn't add folks into those plots.
Mae didn’t like the idea of dying in Tylerton, whatever the graveyard. It was like the place never quite got to be home, any more than Cauwetska had. Kind of like nowhere was home, hadn’t been since they left Boone. No, since before that—not since Daddy left. She couldn’t seem to put down roots, and didn’t care to imagine herself on a headstone in this churchyard, even though that seemed to be exactly where she would end up.
Funny thing to be thinking about. She was twenty-six years old and as healthy as the proverbial horse.
Mae walked back to the stone by the holly bush. Curious whose grave Privilege had laid on to lick his wounds, she read the inscription. Elizabeth Andrews Tyler Ridley. Born 1799, Died 1825. Twenty-six years old.
That was one weird coincidence. In her mind Mae heard Dr. Pena: “The spirit world is real, and if we don’t pay attention to it, it will do something to get our attention.” If a person had a calling and ignored it, the spirit world might do something big.
Like get a cat hurt and drop it on some old grave whose occupant just happened to have married both a Tyler and a Ridley. A woman who died at Mae’s age. Calculate the odds on that.
As Mae walked home, she saw the usual cluster of retired men gathered on the bench in the parking lot at Buddy’s smoking and drinking coffee, wrapped in their winter jackets and ear-flap caps, shooting the breeze. Old black men, some of whose dialect Mae still couldn’t understand any better than they could understand her mountain accent. As long as the temperatures were in the forties, they were always out there. It took a frost to kill gossip. The oldest of the group raised a friendly hand. She smiled and said good morning, and he replied with a long string of words from which she could make out only “Hubert.” It bothered her that she still couldn’t figure out his speech, since Joe was reputed to be a colorful character and fun to talk with. Hubert had assured her that even being local he’d still had to “learn how to speak Joe.”
Hearing her husband’s name, Mae slowed down. She noticed that Hubert wasn’t in one of the bays working on a car, so she walked to the office door and went in. Hubert was behind the desk, writing up a receipt for a customer, a large, gray-haired black woman wearing orthopedic shoes, a heavy winter coat, and a knit hat. Hubert looked up at Mae, smiled, and handed the customer her receipt as she gave him a check.
“You have a good day, Miss Ella.”
“You too, honey.”
The bell on the scratched and scuffed red door jangled as the customer left. Hubert slid the check under the money and closed the cash drawer. “I heard Joe trying to get to you.”
“What’d he say?”
Hubert grinned. “He asked if you were keeping an eye on me so Miss Ella wouldn’t run off with me.”
“I still don’t speak Joe.”
“He still doesn’t speak Mae. Y’all need to start signing. You out for a walk?”
“No.” She hesitated. “Ronnie lost a cat. I found it. Down by the old church.” Everyone knew that meant the little Episcopal church, not the big new Baptist church or the in-between size and age Presbyterian church. “I found it the same way I found Mack.”
Hubert came around from behind the counter. “Come on, you still think you can do that?”
“I know I can. Ask Ronnie.”
“Honey. You lucked out.” Here came that condescending tone again. “There’s no such thing as ESP or whatever you want to call it. You took a good guess.”
“No, I didn’t.”
Hubert opened the door to the garage, where a mud-encrusted pickup sat on the lift, and paused. “I gotta help Buddy with this truck. Don’t go off the deep end on me, hon.” He gave her a quick half-hug with one arm, as if trying to lighten the criticism. “I hope you didn’t tell Ronnie you’re psychic.”
He didn’t take her gift seriously. “I’m not going off some deep end, and I did. I’m coming out. Right here in Tylerton, North Carolina. Hubert Ridley, I am coming out of the closet as a psychic.”
He shook his head, adjusted the cap that contained his hair, and gave her a crooked half-smile. “I wish you wouldn’t.” And he returned to work.
To the closed door, Mae said under her breath, “Too bad. ’Cause I already did.”
As she walked across the street, past Ronnie’s big brick house with its trimmed hedges and winter pansies, Mae felt both angry and relieved. It wasn’t how she’d expected to feel. Coming out like that should have made her nervous, like it did in the televised college class. But somehow, helping Ronnie and his white cat, she felt right. More than right. Justified.
In the blue and white kitchen of her house, Mae refilled the cats’ water bowl and put it back on the porch, hoping Privilege would survive his injuries and be back out there sunning soon. As she made herself a pot of coffee, ready to get back to studying her personal training manual, she thought again about what Dr. Pena had said. Maybe Mae could open up and use the sight and still make it fit with her promise to her mother—that she wouldn’t use it to do anything wicked. Seeing the student Dana having an argument with her husband hadn’t felt right, and Mae didn’t want to go prying into anyone’s life that way. Finding lost pets and people was important, though, and could save some lives and misery. Hubert was just going to have to get used to this.
Chapter Five
“Mae, if you’re going to read so much into this, maybe that grave meant you’re going to die.” Sallie took the first she
et of cookies out of the oven. “And I don’t believe that for a minute, mind you. Superstition, though, that’s how it works. You can make anything out to mean something if you put things together the way you want them to look.” She bent over to bring out the next batch. “Hubert’s right. You took a good guess.” She placed the cookie sheet on the stove top and closed the oven door. “Of course, if Ronnie believed you’re psychic, then you’ll never hear the end of it. Nobody will.”
Mae still felt the chill of Sallie’s first suggestion, even as the cloud that came from the second one moved in. “What do you mean?”
From the living room came a question from Brook or Stream—hard to tell whose voice. “Are the cookies done?”
“They’re too hot. You have to wait,” Sallie called back.
Jim drifted in, gave the women thoughtful examination, as if assessing the level of argument going on, and opened a cabinet to take out a jar of coffee beans. Dressed in an old sweater and corduroys, his lean, slightly concave form made him look more like Mae’s idea of a professor than Dr. Tann at CVU. Jim had glasses and that serious look about him, and he read books nonstop. “How many for coffee?” He took the grinder and filters out.
“Decaf, if that’s what you’re making,” Sallie said, and Mae seconded the vote. “Jim, don’t you think Ronnie will talk up Mae finding that cat?”
“Like Yolanda Cherry talked up her finding Mack?” He filled the carafe halfway from the tap and used it to fill the coffee maker. “No one took that seriously.”
Sallie slid the cookies onto a cooling rack. “That’s because Yolanda didn’t. She knows better.”
Mae wondered if that meant her former classmate had made fun of her for claiming she knew right where Mack was. More likely Yolanda wanted credit for finding the lost hunter in the woods at dusk. “Why should she?” Mae said. “It would make her look like a better cop if she’d done the finding herself.”
“Maybe,” Jim said, scooping beans into the grinder. “But Ronnie’s another story.”
“He’s addled. Not all of his dogs are barking.” Sallie leaned her hips against the counter and folded her arms across her chest. Except for the thick grey curls down to her shoulders, Sallie looked young for her fifty years, the dark eyes and the strong, solid build reminding Mae of Hubert. But Sallie had a kind of fire that her son lacked. “I don’t know how he gets to be mayor year after year.”
Jim showed a hint of a smile. “No competition worth looking at. You finally planning to run?”
“I’m getting close to it. As long as people around here don’t think we’re hippies. Having our daughter-in-law telling folks she’s psychic is all we need to seal that image. I’d never get elected.”
Mae was used to Sallie’s rants on all kinds of issues, including Ronnie’s inaction in his role, but hadn’t imagined she would take it that far. “Are you serious about running for mayor?”
“I’ve been telling her to.” Jim pressed the button on the coffee grinder, and the noise drowned out any hope of conversation for a moment. When he stopped and dumped the freshly ground coffee into the filter, he said, “It might be the only way to get some other farmers to think about the environment, get ’em out from under Big Ag.”
“And I’d hurt your chances? I mean, Ronnie always says y’all should move to Vermont, but he'd vote for himself anyway. And he really took what I did like it was normal, when I saw that cat. He wasn’t spooked, and he wasn’t cynical like you all are.”
“You think we’re cynical?” Sallie sounded hurt. “Mae, we’re not cynics. We just think you have to be exaggerating, that’s all.”
“You and Hubert, you’re all so sure I can’t be right. I don’t get it. I know what happened. I’m not making it up, and it’s not just some coincidence. I dropped in on this class Patsy’s taking at CVU—and there are educated people who take this kind of thing seriously.”
“Really?” Jim leaned against the refrigerator. “I’d never have expected that.”
“Well, it won’t be educated people hearing about it in Tylerton,” Sallie said. “It’ll be ignorant people, for the most part. Here’s what’s gonna happen. Joe works on Ronnie’s yard. Those old men get to yakking. Ronnie tells Joe. Joe does everybody’s yard that has a yard worth doing, and he tells them some Joe version of it. And Joe, can’t you see him down at Buddy’s with those old men? It’ll be all over town by Joe-mail in a week.”
“Joe? Three days.” Jim chuckled. “Mae’ll have people knocking on her door wanting her to look for lost puppies.”
Sallie snorted a half-laugh and said with an exaggerated old-south accent, “She’ll have the purebred Tylers asking her to verify the provenance of their antiques.”
“Or the feral Tylers asking her to verify the provenance of their son.” Jim grinned. “Mack’s folks ever thank you for turning him up?”
“Not likely they even know,” Mae said. “Nor that they’d be grateful.”
“If word does get out, and I think it will,” Sallie said, becoming serious again, “I’d really be grateful if you declined to keep doing this—assuming you actually can. Real or not hardly matters. I’m trying to get people in this town to wake up. I want to educate the farmers, keep the chain stores and fast food out, get some local businesses in, and if I do run for mayor, I don’t need the religious people thinking I’ve got a witchy-woman in the family, or the educated people thinking we’re a bunch of far-out hippie flakes who ought to move to Vermont.”
“If I could save somebody’s life? Or their pet?”
“Mae, that’s one cat.” Sallie pointed a thumb over her shoulder, indicating her backyard. “The water running out back in that ditch is so full of chemicals from everybody else’s fields that the dogs get sick when they drink from it. They drank runoff when the other farmers defoliated their cotton and all three of those dogs had seizures. There's more cancer around here than there should be in a town this size, and frogs with three legs and five legs and God knows what else, and I need to be taken seriously. You go for a run in anybody else’s fields besides ours, and when the dirt blows up, you’re getting a lungful of neurotoxins. Read the labels on those big tanks parked out there when they’re spraying. That’s going in the groundwater and our grandchildren are drinking it. Even if—God knows, I can’t believe it—but even if some professor at CVU can prove there’s such a thing as being psychic, I don’t need that woo-woo hanging on my tail. Find a professor who’ll help me get the water cleaned up or help start some decent businesses. I need science behind what matters, not fluff like psychic powers. And I need my reputation.”
The coffee pot burbled. Jim sat at the table, leaned back in his chair, and crossed an ankle on his knee. “Good campaign speech, ma’am. I liked that part about the neurotoxins. Don’t let her bite your head off, Mae. But you see the point?”
Mae nodded. She felt torn between the need to be right—to be herself—and to support her family. “I reckon. Yeah. I didn’t think about politics.” Ronnie didn’t do much for the town except keep it running the way it already was, while Sallie would be a firestorm of a mayor, if anyone would vote for her. Sallie’s own opinionated character might be as much of an obstacle as having a psychic in the family. But Mae would vote for her, and for the things Sallie wanted to get done. “I’ll try not to make you look flaky.”
“Thanks, hon. I hope it’s not too late.”
Mae had promised to drop by Rhoda-Rae and Arnie’s to catch them up on her start in the personal trainer course. She accepted Sallie’s suggestion that she bring some of the cookies over with her.
Hubert was in the middle of a game with the twins on the living room floor. When she asked if he’d like to go with her to her mother’s, he gave her the martyred please-don’t-make-me look. The twins got almost the same expression when she asked them, as if it was a chore they didn’t want to do. Mae couldn’t blame them. And truthfully, in Mae’s opinion, the less of her mother’s influence on the girls, the better. The suggestion they go
with her was a formality, one of those things she did because she had the vague sense you ought to. She had no expectation of agreement and didn’t even want it. Leaving the rest of the family lingering over cookies and coffee felt better than dragging them along.
As she drove to Cauwetska, she thought of Hubert’s joke about how they had to seat their families straight across from each other at holiday meals because Mae’s family couldn’t turn their heads to the left and Hubert’s couldn’t look to the right. It was funny when he said it, but not so much fun when they actually had them all in the same room. And the differences went well beyond politics. There was religion, too. The only thing they all might agree on would be that Mae should keep her psychic abilities under wraps, if for different reasons.
Pulling up at the trailer, Mae saw Arnie’s car, but not her mother’s. It was a little after seven o’clock, and Rhoda-Rae should have been on a shift that got off at three. The Christmas decorations were still up, but not plugged in. Not a good sign. Arnie’s energy was probably low, and Rhoda-Rae probably nagging him: When are you going to take those down, Easter?
Carrying the cookies, Mae walked up the unpainted wooden steps to the trailer and knocked. Through the drawn curtains she could see the flickering lights of the TV and hear its muffled electronic voices. On either side of the trailer, TV lights also danced in neighbors’ windows.
Her stepfather called, “That you, Mae?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“Come on in. It’s open.”
Letting herself in, Mae saw Arnie’s heavy form reclining in his lounger chair. He nodded to the couch, and she took a seat. No lights on, just the TV. Arnie's tired face managed a smile when she put the cookies on the coffee table, and he leaned forward with a small grunt, opened the box and took a cookie out.
“Thanks honey.” He bit in, seemed surprised. “These are good. Really good.”