“He didn’t want to get rid of you.” But she could feel herself losing ground, backing toward the precipice.
Implacably, he pressed forward. “Is that right? So he said I’d set that fire and killed Vause out of friendly interest?”
“No. No. That’s what he thought—”
“He had no reason to think it, Jottie. Not one goddamn shred of evidence. He was just trying to wreck my life.”
“Felix, listen.” She put out her hand and touched his. “Listen, even if he did want—even if he was trying to wreck your life—which I don’t believe—it didn’t work, did it? Your life isn’t wrecked, is it?”
“Sure,” he said. “My life is swell, especially the part where everyone in town wonders if I burnt American Everlasting to the ground and killed my best friend.”
It was true. She licked her lips. “Most people don’t think that. Most people don’t think about it at all anymore, I bet.”
“Sol thinks about it,” Felix said.
“No—”
He spoke over her. “He thinks about how he almost got what he wanted—missed it just by a hair. He must hate that. I bet it eats at him—if he had only kept his damn mouth shut, he’d have gotten you, after a while. And later he could have figured out a way to get in good with Daddy and take my job.”
“Get in good with Daddy? What are you talking about?”
An impatient twitch of his shoulders. “Don’t play dumb—he wanted what Vause and I had. You think it’s a coincidence he’s manager over there? Just like me?”
It sounded so right. He seemed so sure. Could it be? She gave ground, fumbling for a new position. “I don’t know, I—you don’t have to, but—Sol’s been awful lonely, I bet.”
His hand closed around hers. “Sol lied. He lied about me.” His fingers gripped hers painfully. “And Daddy believed him. He believed him instead of me.”
This, too, was undeniable. “Thank you, Oscar. We’ll be down tomorrow to clear this up,” their father called resonantly as he closed the door behind the retreating, unhappy police chief. For a moment, he stood with his head bowed over the door handle. And then he turned to Felix. “I wish I believed you were telling the truth, Felix. But I don’t.” That had been the end of everything between them. “Such an awful, awful time,” she murmured.
“Yeah. And Sol started it,” he reminded her.
“Yes.”
A minute passed in silence. “I stayed,” he said quietly.
He had stayed. Jottie stared out into the shimmering water, thinking about her brother. He alone had never failed her. He had failed many others, but not her. He was the only one who knew what she had had, the only one who had acknowledged her suffering when she lost it, and the only one who had ever given up anything for her. And he had been wronged. By Sol. Sol had told a story that laid waste to Felix’s life. She couldn’t defend him, and she couldn’t ignore what had passed. There was no possibility of ignoring what had passed. The past was the only thing that really existed; there could be no future that was not based on the past. She had to choose one side or the other, and the side she chose had to be Felix’s. It had been a ridiculous idea—that she could make something new, without him.
She took a breath. “All right. I’ll stop.”
“Sol’s a liar,” said Felix, victorious.
She closed her eyes and nodded. “Let’s go home.” She pulled her hand from his and dropped her head back against the seat.
She heard him smile. “Okay. Let’s go home.” The key slid into the ignition, the gear thumped lightly into place, the cloth of his sleeve squeaked as he set his arm along the top of the seat and looked over his shoulder. He paused. “Sol hasn’t been pining for you, if that’s what you’re fussing about. He’s got a girl up in Cumberland.”
Without opening her eyes, she said, “Sometimes I hate you, Felix.”
“Pooh,” he said amiably. “You do not.”
July 23
Dear Sol,
I can’t see you anymore. I must have been crazy to think that I could have done with the past, and crazier still to think that it didn’t matter what you’d said about Felix so long ago. It matters to him, and I suppose to me, too. I will always remember our childhood friendship and these last weeks. But I can’t see you anymore.
I’m sorry.
Jottie
31
It was the hot middle of Sunday afternoon, and I was reading Gone with the Wind under the house. I had to. Minerva was mad at me for reading her book to shreds, and Jottie was mad at me for telling Bird about the soldier getting his leg chopped off without any chloroform, and altogether, discretion was the better part of valor, just like Jottie always said. So I was reading it under the house. Under the porch, to be specific. It was the only place that had light enough to read by, because there was a hole, partly made by possums and partly made by me. I despised possums, with their naked tails and their bleary eyes, but for Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler and poor old Ashley Wilkes, I was willing to live and let live.
Scarlett was just telling a passel of lies, dressed up in her mother’s old drapes, when I heard Father’s footsteps over my head. I sat up straight, listening. You hardly ever heard him. Where was he going? I tracked his steps like a pointer dog. He came down the front stairs, and I could feel my ears twist, following him. Was he off to do some bootlegging? Suddenly he passed like a breeze along the side of the house. Pooh. He wasn’t going anywhere, just to the backyard. I settled back with Rhett and Scarlett, but I couldn’t concentrate on their doings anymore, so I crawled out and shook the grit off me, and then I stuffed Gone with the Wind up my skirt, just to be on the safe side. Last time Minerva had caught me with it, she’d hidden it, and Jottie had made me read Elsie Dinsmore instead. I thought I’d die.
I strolled real casual down the side yard and peeked around the corner of the house into the backyard. There he was, Father, standing all alone at the far end of the grass in the shade of the red oak, smoking. I would just go and talk to him. That would be all right. It was a breathless afternoon, and the lawn was steaming as I came across it. He smiled at me when I came close, but I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I reached to hug him—and Gone with the Wind came crashing out of my skirt onto his shoe.
He yelped and jumped, and I was busy saying I was sorry when he picked up the book and looked at it. “Any good?” he asked.
“Why, yes, of course,” I said. “Ain’t you read it yet?”
“No,” he said, turning it over. The cover was just about to come off now. Minerva was going to have kittens. “I haven’t gotten around to it.”
“Oh, you’d like it,” I said. “It’s extremely gripping.”
“Extremely gripping, huh?” He smiled and opened it to a place where the binding was broken. “How many times have you read it?”
“ ’Bout twenty. But don’t tell Minerva.”
“Why not?”
I looked at the book. “She’s already mad, and she thinks I only read it four times.”
That made him laugh, and I was proud. “Seems like you might need your own book,” he said.
“It costs three dollars,” I said cautiously.
He whistled.
“But it’s got more than a thousand pages. It’s got a thousand and twenty-four.”
“Well. We’ll see,” he said. “We’ll see what we can do.” He handed the book back to me.
Then he went on smoking. I looked at him and wished I hadn’t told him how much the book cost. I wished I’d said I didn’t want it. I wished I could hug him without anything falling on his feet, and I wished I could say that I loved him. I’d read about daughters who did that—Elsie Dinsmore, for instance, but other daughters, too, in good books. Their fathers liked it. But my mouth wouldn’t open.
There was the sound of a sash being pulled up. “Felix!” It was Miss Beck calling him from her window. She leaned out over the sill with a paper in her hand. “Have you ever heard of something called the Knoc
k-Pie Trail?”
Just like that, he was smiling. “ ’Course I have. You can’t graduate from high school if you don’t know about the Knock-Pie Trail.”
She made a face, but it was a face that made her prettier than before. “I graduated from high school just fine, and I never heard of the Knock-Pie Trail.”
“It’s a sin and a shame what they call an education down there in Washington.” He didn’t really mean it. He was teasing her.
She laughed. “They just ramble on and on about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, when we could be learning about the Knock-Pie Trail.”
“That’s right.”
Then they smiled at each other and didn’t say anything. I didn’t exactly wish that her legs would be cut off without chloroform, but I wished something would happen to her. Maybe she’d get sick. But that wouldn’t help—she’d just sit in bed until she was better. Maybe she’d get so sick she’d die. I looked at Father and wondered how sad he’d be if she died. He’d get over it.
Finally he said, real quiet, “You going to come down here or am I going to have to come up there?”
She got pink. “I’ll come down.”
“Good,” he said. “Bring the map.”
I noticed that my stomach hurt. Maybe I’d die myself. Wouldn’t that be just like God, to kill me for wishing death on Miss Beck?
“My stomach hurts,” I said.
Father stopped looking at Miss Beck’s window and looked at me. “Did you eat green plums again?”
I shook my head.
“Better go tell Jottie,” he said. He rubbed my back. “She’ll fix you up.”
He was watching me as I went, but once I was inside, I didn’t go find Jottie. I went upstairs to the room I shared with Bird. She was there, on the floor, cutting her everlasting paper dolls from the Sears catalog. She cut out whole families, and then she cut out their furniture and their cars and their bicycles and then she stuck them in a shoe box. She never did anything with them; she just cut them out.
“I don’t know why you waste your time cutting them out when you never play with them,” I snapped.
She looked up at me with her big blue eyes. “I like to cut things out.”
“Whyn’t you chop off their arms and legs, then, if cutting’s all you like. You can make yourself a whole amputated family.”
“I don’t want an amputated family,” she said, peaceful. “I want a pretty family. Look.” She held up a golden-haired lady in a brown suit. “She’s the mother.”
“She is not,” I said. I wanted to smash something. “You want to see a mother? Just look down in the backyard at Miss Beck, because I think Father’s going to marry her!”
Bird stared at me for a moment, and then—oh, I could hardly bear it—she smiled. “Really? You think?”
“Don’t you care?” I yelled. “It’s terrible.”
Bird shook her head. “I love Miss Beck.”
“No you don’t,” I said. I sat down on my bed with a thump, but it wasn’t enough. I toppled over and smashed my face in my pillow.
After a minute, I felt Bird’s hand on my back. She held it there. “If you don’t want Daddy to marry her, I don’t, either,” she said. “All right?”
I rolled over to look at her. She was just little, really. She didn’t know the things I knew—that if Father married Miss Beck, he would never be ours again. That he’d look at her instead of us and smile and never wait for us. That he’d tell her his secrets and we’d have to traipse around, digging through scraps to know anything atall. She didn’t know that Miss Beck would make us beggars, not for money or food but for Father. She was my little sister, and it was up to me to take care of her. I nodded. “All right.”
She picked up the golden-haired paper lady and the scissors. She looked at me, and then she cut that lady right in two.
I laughed. “Give me one.” Bird gave me a girl in a satin slip, and I chopped her into pieces. We cut up nearly the whole box full of dolls.
Felix stopped the car.
“This is it?” said Layla, scrutinizing the layers of greenery outside the window. “I thought it was in the mountains.”
“Mm-hm.”
She swung around to look at him. “Felix! Is this the Knock-Pie Trail?” Her eyes narrowed. “Or not?”
“Not,” he admitted.
She opened her mouth and then closed it. With a tiny smile, she folded her hands in her lap, relaxed against her seat, and waited.
Minutes ticked by, and the only sound was the droning roar of insects. Then she heard the car door close. Startled, she glanced to her left. He was gone.
A minute later he reappeared. “Come on,” he said, “there’s a stream down there.”
“You!” she spluttered, but she was laughing, too. At him, at herself, at her pretense of resistance, at how much she wanted to touch him. Holding hands loosely, they clambered down something that had once been a path, entering a wood of thin, close-grown trees. Their struggle for survival had left them pale and listless, and their leaves fanned out low, catching at Layla’s hair as she went.
Felix swatted a branch out of his way. “There,” he said with satisfaction, as if he had invented the stream himself. “Let’s go wading.”
“Wading!” cried Layla, but he was irresistible, and the water was dark and cool and alluring, bordered with flat boulders and fallen trees. She glanced down at her shoes. And her hose. “Turn around,” she said.
Obediently, Felix turned to face upstream. She lifted her skirt to unhook her garters, and the silk fell away from her legs, leaving them free and light. Stepping gingerly out of her shoes onto the warm rocks, she rolled her stockings into a ball and straightened to find Felix watching her with amusement. “You’re not supposed to look,” she said. “Only cads look.”
He chuckled and bent to take off his shoes. “I’ve been called worse.”
The dark water was a shock of exquisite coolness, and they wandered along its edges in silence for a space of time. Treading slowly through the stream, Layla listened to the inexplicable noises of unseen living things and sighed with pleasure. “We’re so far away,” she murmured. She stooped to watch a skeeter balance on the water’s surface.
Felix sidestepped a half-submerged tree. “Here,” he said, stopping at a level spot in the water and holding out his hand. “Stand right here.”
Layla stood where he directed her. “Why?”
“Because,” he said, and kissed her.
After a minute, she began to tremble. “I’m going to fall,” she whispered.
He pulled away and looked at her questioningly. “Are you really?”
She nodded, frightened, and he swung her up into his arms and carried her to a low rock jutting into the water. He set her there on its cool, shaded surface and watched her for a moment. “Lie down,” he said, and she did, glad to feel solid stone beneath her. She closed her eyes, almost sleepy there in the buzzing silence.
“What happened?” he asked after a time.
“You,” she said drowsily. “I feel like I’m taking my life in my hands, being with you.”
“What?” His fingers snaked around her forearm and grasped her tightly.
She opened her eyes at the harshness in his voice and saw his face set and tense above hers. “I didn’t mean—” she broke off, confused.
“What did you mean?”
“I mean,” she stammered, “that you have an, um, effect on me. I get dizzy. When you kiss me.”
His hold on her loosened and his face relaxed into a grin. “Oh. That.”
“What did you think I meant?” she asked, curious in her turn.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he bent over her, smiling. “There’s only one cure, you know.”
“What’s that?”
“And you’re already lying down. So you can’t fall.” He drew his hand along the curve of her hip.
“What’s the cure?” she asked, watching him greedily.
“Practice,” he said, and s
he felt his warm lips through her dress.
32
“Hello?”
“Jottie? Don’t hang up!” Sol’s voice rose anxiously.
“I can’t talk to you,” she muttered, pressing herself tight into the wall for reinforcement.
“I know, I know. Just listen to me for a second.” He paused, waiting to be hung up on. After a moment, he exhaled. “Okay. Jottie, you’re throwing your life away. I’m not saying you have to—uh, choose me, but choosing Felix is, is—it’s nuts.” He paused, but Jottie said nothing. “You know what he’s like, honey. Everything he’s ever said has been a lie.”
“Everyone lies,” she said softly. “Even you, once or twice. I can’t talk to you.”
“I know.” He sighed. “Listen, Jottie, I want you to change your mind—”
“I won’t.”
“I know. But if you change your mind, call me. Or if you can’t call me, just come down to the mill to see me. No one will think a thing of it, and I’ll be there. I’ll be waiting.”
“No,” she said. “I can’t do that. And I have to go now. I’m helping Layla with her book.”
He hung up.
For a moment, Jottie stayed against the wall, thinking.
Mr. McKubin came across the field, black as a crow.
She had been nine. Maybe ten.
Black as a crow, he marched slowly through the tall grass, his head bent. The children, arrayed in a line across the top of the fence, watched his patient progress. They had been expecting him.
“Solomon,” he said when he was close.
Sol climbed down and stood before his father, his back straight.
“Am I to understand that this is your doing?” said Mr. McKubin. He held up a golf club, or what had been a golf club and was now a stick with no head.
Jottie lowered her eyes respectfully, but looking sideways through her eyelashes she saw Felix and Vause nudge each other, their mouths tight with suppressed laughter.
“Yessir,” Sol said. His eyes slid toward the other boys to see if they were watching. “It was my fault. I did it.”
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