All the Dead Lie Down

by Mary Willis Walker

  By the time she’d awakened from her stupor, it was nearly over. She staggered out of the smoky house, still drunk, not even aware her home was on fire, forgetting she had children to take care of.

  The firemen said Ellie and Tom would have burned to death if Harold had not crawled in through the flames and got them out. And they said Harold could never have done it without the rain. Instead of Tom just getting some very bad burns on his arm, both children would have burned to death, but the heavens had opened at the last minute and spilled down rain, torrents of blessed rain on their house in Bay-town, just in time to dampen the flames so Harold could get to them.

  It was the last straw for Harold, of course. He’d divorced her and he’d gotten custody of the children. It was the best thing: he was not a bad father.

  She moves her lips to catch the fat drops. She understands now what she is meant to do with this new beginning: she is meant to save those people in the Senate from the poison gas. That’s why Fate put her under the deck to hear them talking—so she could pay back what she owes. Why didn’t she see it before?

  “Thank you,” she whispers to the rain, “thank you for helping then, and thank you for helping now.”

  Sarah Jane goes back to sleep, thinking if she were to worship anything in this world it would be the rain.

  IT WAS NOT DEATH, FOR I STOOD UP, AND ALL THE DEAD, LIE DOWN—

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  Long past midnight Molly Cates sat watching the rain wriggle down the dark window in quivering, wormlike runnels.

  It had taken hours for her to calm down enough to start thinking in any coherent way. The adrenaline surge of excitement she’d felt on the way home, the undeniable outlaw thrill of having gotten away with something very dangerous, was finally subsiding. But it was like robbing a bank and discovering what you had stolen was not the gold coins you’d been after but a sack of rotting garbage. She didn’t know what on earth to do with Crocker’s revelation.

  Parnell.

  Parnell Morrisey had paid Crocker sixty thousand dollars to call her daddy’s death a suicide and close the case.

  Why? Why would he have done that? The only theory Molly could dredge up was so completely far-fetched she could barely get her mind around it: Parnell had killed Vernon Cates. Could that possibly be true?

  Given the right circumstances, she knew, anyone could kill anyone. After all, mothers killed their children, men killed their best friends, lovers killed one another, people committed vile, incomprehensible acts all the time. But Parnell? That gentle, loving, rational man, her godfather and lifelong protector, killing his boyhood friend—the idea was too outlandish.

  But maybe something had happened, they’d had a fight.

  Maybe her daddy was going to write something that threatened Parnell’s political career.

  Maybe the friendship deteriorated after they moved to Lake Travis. It did seem to Molly, as she thought back, that they had seen less of the Morriseys after the move. Even though the Morriseys had an apartment in Austin, just a thirty-five-minute drive from Volente, they had rarely seen them. Her daddy was preoccupied with Franny and his writing. Parnell was busy with the legislature when he was in Austin and running his ranch back in Lubbock the rest of the time. Rose was often ill.

  But maybe they’d had a disagreement Molly hadn’t been aware of—a feud of some sort.

  She would, of course, ask Parnell about it.

  She could call him now, get him out of bed, and ask him point-blank: Why did you pay Olin Crocker off? Did you murder my daddy?

  But if he had done this, he had concealed it for twenty-eight years and would be unlikely to confess it now.

  If only Harriet still had her wits. Her brother’s confidante and a lifelong close friend of Parnell and Rose, Harriet would certainly have known if the friendship had gone sour. Her brother would have talked about it, and even after they’d moved away he would have written about it. Her daddy had kept up a regular, weekly correspondence with his lonesome sister left back in Lubbock. They were both prodigious letter writers of the old school, who always preferred writing to talking on the phone.

  And Harriet had said she’d saved every word Vernon Cates had written. Maybe somewhere in that vast morass of Harriet’s archives there were letters about it, letters from the year following the move.

  Molly’s spirits sagged at the thought of confronting the archives. Unable to face them before, she’d banished them into storage and neglected them, but she knew it was the inevitable next step. Tomorrow she’d have to have a go at the archives. A needle in a haystack would be easier, and a lot more fun to look for.

  When Grady Traynor arrived with his dog at 3 A.M. and saw Molly sitting in the dark living room, he knew enough not to turn on the lights. Without a word, he came in and sat at her feet, leaning back against her knees. The dog thumped down next to him.

  Grady joined her in staring straight ahead into the black, rainy window. After a few minutes of silence he asked, “What do you get out of it, Molly?”

  She took awhile before answering. In the long years she’d been keeping these monthly vigils she had never tried to explain them to anyone. She had never really understood the need to sit in the dark from time to time and watch the night away. It had started after her father died; certainly it was connected to his death.

  Now she found she wanted to understand it. And to talk about it. She said, “I think it’s because I don’t have any ritual in my life, no religion, no traditions. Maybe it’s like lighting a candle or saying Kaddish or ululating or wearing sackcloth and ashes.”

  “Mourning.”

  “I suppose.”

  “But most mourning comes to an end,” Grady said very quietly. “Don’t you think that’s what rituals are for—to bring it to an end after a given time?”

  “Probably. But I don’t seem to be able to do that. Maybe you have to keep on mourning until you get it right.”

  “Or until the dead lie down,” he said. He was looking up at her now, his pale eyes silvery in the dark.

  “Grady, I never even went to the cemetery when they buried him. After the funeral, I just walked away. I didn’t say good-bye, and I’ve never been to his grave.”

  “Do you want to tell me what’s been happening, Molly?”

  Yes, she did want to tell him—desperately. He was the best listener she knew, that rare man who didn’t thrust himself into a problem and try to solve everything. He was willing just to hear it, to acknowledge it as a problem, to listen to you massage it until you were satisfied. She wanted to tell him about Parnell and the payoff. She wanted desperately to tell him, but she couldn’t without telling the Olin Crocker part and that was a subject she could never discuss with him. Secrets had a tendency to cast a shadow much larger than themselves.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t have anything to tell yet.”

  “Well, I’m around. Any time you’re in the mood to talk.”

  She rested her hand on the back of his neck. “I know.” He turned and knelt in front of her, sliding his hands slowly up her legs. “Listen, Copper and I are badly in need of some sack time. We’d love to have you join us.” His hands moved up her belly and brushed her breasts. “We really desire that. Come to bed, Molly.”

  She leaned over to meet his lips for a long kiss.

  “Okay,” she said, a little breathlessly.

  He stood up, took hold of her hands, and lifted her out of the chair. “Hot dog, Copper,” he said. “We just got lucky.”

  Every time Grady Traynor got up from her bed to go to work, she had to resist the impulse to pull him back, wrap her arms around him, press her body tight against his back, and beg him not to go. She’d never done it, of course, or even told him she felt like doing it, but the impulse seemed to be getting stronger.

  They’d beeped him, and he would go, as he always did, immediately alert, without a grumble. Even though he’d had less than two hours of sleep.

  She checked the glowing green num
erals on the clock radio. “Four-fifteen, Grady. What is it?”

  “The Gristead case. Karen Gristead says she wants to make a confession—to me.”

  “Of course she does. It’s your bedside manner.” She ran her hand up his bare back. “And she doesn’t know the half of it.”

  He leaned down and kissed her, but it was perfunctory. His attention was already on Karen Gristead and her estranged husband who’d been found dead in his bathtub with a bullet hole where his left eye had been.

  Grady picked up his pants, which were in a heap on the floor. “When I leave, are you going back to the window?”

  “No. I’m going back to sleep,” she said.

  But when she heard him shut the front door she pulled on a big T-shirt and went downstairs. The dog followed her, the jingle of his tags the only sound in the silent house.

  The window was still inky black, just as she’d left it, and the rain continued to run down the glass. She settled into the wing chair with her legs curled up underneath her.

  The dog circled a few times, then thumped down in front of the chair. Copper had been retired two years earlier from the Austin Police Department’s K-9 Unit after his handler had been beaten to death. In Molly’s opinion, the dog’s behavior problems resulted from the trauma. He was still waiting for his handler to come back.

  “Oh, Copper,” she murmured, “the past isn’t really past, is it? You’re the only one in my life who seems to understand that.”

  THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN, AND WHAT DO YOU THINK?

  SHE LIVED UPON NOTHING BUT VICTUALS AND DRINK;

  VICTUALS AND DRINK WERE THE CHIEF OF HER DIET,

  AND YET THIS OLD WOMAN COULD NEVER BE QUIET.

  —MOTHER GOOSE

  Even a pint of the best Scotch whiskey never gave her a float like this. Sarah Jane is soaring. She is a child rolling down a green grassy slope, a buzzard riding the air currents, a sleepwalker drifting through time, seeing little relics of the past. There’s a tiny skull that was once Theobald, the squirrel she tamed to eat nuts out of her hand in Gramma’s backyard. There are some rocks Tom found at the creek the year he learned to walk and feathers Ellie collected at the zoo. And there is a lock of long silky brown hair that was Harold’s when she first knew him and they made love on the beach. Sarah Jane sleeps, she sweats, she shivers, she wakes, she dreams, she talks, she raves, she laughs, she remembers.

  But mostly she dreams. She is sick with a fever and has to stay home from school today. It is raining and the rain pings and dings on the tin-can roof, and some of the rain falls through holes in the tin and hits her face, like when she slept under the deck. “Rain, rain, go away,” she sings when a raindrop pings on her cheek. “Come again some other day,” Gramma sings.

  Gramma brings her something sweet and cool to drink. She kneels down and her hand shakes as she puts the cup to Sarah Jane’s lips. She dribbles some on Sarah Jane’s neck. Gramma is wearing antlers trimmed with foil and other shiny things. Sarah Jane laughs to see it. “Gramma,” she says, “what big horns you have.” “The better to heal you with, my babee,” Gramma says, and she laughs too. This is a dream Sarah Jane loves.

  Then she dreams of candlelight and being surrounded by tiny clean white skulls and hundreds of bones arranged just so, feathers, pine cones, smooth stones of many colors. But this dream she doesn’t like at all. It is too much like being a body laid out for viewing in a funeral home, like Mama was. She sees the chicken feet, and the whole bird’s wing which still has some blood on it. The candle flickers as the rain and wind pick up. Dreams can go bad so fast.

  “I’ve got to go,” she says.

  “Nooooo,” Gramma says.

  “There’s something I’ve got to do.”

  “Oh, noooo.”

  “Really. It’s important.”

  “What be so important, babee?” Gramma asks.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You be sick. Got a fever, an infection.”

  “I know. But there’s something …”

  “Don’t you know me?” asks Gramma. “I am Mother Teresa.”

  “No, you’re my Gramma.”

  “Oh, no, God told me take care of the homeless and the sick and the hungry. And there you were, babee, waiting at my tree.”

  “That’s your tree?” Sarah Jane asks in awe.

  “Oh, yes. It was a sign.”

  “A sign?”

  “The sign say I will make a miracle. God is testing me now I have brought you back to life to see if I make you well.”

  Sarah Jane thinks about being afraid. There are things here a person might be afraid of, but she needs to remember what she has to do. She can smell the rain as if it were real rain instead of dream rain. It is the kind of drenching rain that makes the earth swell and soften to mud and makes the trees smell overripe, all that wood and greenness turning to sodden decay. Never has she had a dream like this before, so real and so unreal.

  She remembers something she was trying to remember—that second verse. Little Bopeep fell fast asleep and dreamt she heard them bleating. When she awoke, it was a joke, for still they all were fleeting.

  She sits up and remembers what she needs to do: she needs to call Little Bopeep and tell her about the terrible danger the Senate is in. She saw it all so clearly under the tree: her children were saved, now she needs to save people to pay the universe back. “What day is it?” she asks. She can see daylight through the chinks in the wall. Even so, the candle still burns. And it is still raining.

  “You are sitting up, babee!” The woman puts her face close to Sarah Jane’s. She has taken off the turban with the antlers on it. She has a fuzz of gray hair on her small dark head, which is perched on a long slender neck. “The miracle is complete now. It is accomplished.”

  “But there’s an emergency, something so important.”

  “What can be more important than a miracle? Tell me that, babee.”

  Sarah Jane looks into the woman’s glowing black eyes which seem to float in a sea of cream decorated with red swirls. She looks around at the circle of bones and rocks surrounding her, at the candles and the bird’s wing. She has fallen into the hands of a madwoman. “Tell me about the miracle,” she says.

  “I found you laying dead and gone. You be cold as the grave. No pulse what-so-ever.”

  “There was a tree,” Sarah Jane says.

  “Oh, yes, babee! You are remembering. At the roots of my sacred tree I find you. That is where I perform the miracle. Then I bring you back here.”

  “How did you do that?” asks Sarah Jane.

  “I carry you.”

  Sarah Jane studies the woman. She is very, very thin. Probably weighs sixty pounds less than Sarah Jane. “That really is a miracle,” she says carefully.

  “Yes, yes, a miracle. And then I heal you. It is not enough to bring a dead person to life. Also I must heal you.”

  “I was sick.”

  “Bad infection in your leg. Cellulitis. Dehydration. High fever. Now look.”

  Sarah Jane lifts her head to look down at her leg. The redness and swelling are nearly gone. Only a few scabs remain.

  “It is much better. How did you do that?”

  “I give you liquids with electrolytes and sugar and salt. This I know from being a nurse’s aide at Bellevue Hospital in New York, many years. The infection—” The madwoman raises her hands and wiggles the long, delicate fingers. “It burned itself up.”

  “Well, thank you,” says Sarah Jane, feeling a moment of real gratitude. Her mind is whirring. She needs to get this crazy woman to help her do what she is still too weak to do herself. She needs to get her to call that writer, Bopeep, Molly whatever-her-name-is. Before it’s too late to stop Billy Goat from killing all those people.

  “What’s your name?” Sarah Jane asks.

  “Why, babee, don’t you know me?” She smiles radiantly. “I am Mother Teresa.”

  “Of course,” Sarah Jane says. “I am Cow Lady. And for this miracle to be really
complete we need to let the world know about it.”

  Mother Teresa claps her hands. “They will build a shrine here.”

  “I know just the person to tell the world,” says Sarah Jane. “She will write about it in her magazine and all the world will know.”

  Mother Teresa claps again and her face is radiant. “Yes, babee!”

  Sarah Jane has lucked into just the right approach. “You will call her and bring her here so she can see what you have done,” she says. Then, suddenly, she panics. “My bag! Do you have my bag? The phone number’s in it.”

  Mother Teresa’s laugh is a musical scale. “Oh, babee, sure we got your bag.” She lifts it up to show Sarah Jane. “We got it right here. Nothing to worry about.”

  MY FATHER DIED A MONTH AGO

  AND LEFT ME ALL HIS RICHES;

  A FEATHER BED, A WOODEN LEG,

  AND A PAIR OF LEATHER BREECHES;

  A COFFEE POT WITHOUT A SPOUT,

  A CUP WITHOUT A HANDLE,

  A TOBACCO PIPE WITHOUT A LID,

  AND HALF A FARTHING CANDLE.

  —MOTHER GOOSE

  Sunday morning arrived dull and drizzly at the window; the rain persisted but seemed wrung out, exhausted with its night’s work.

  Molly Cates did what she did first every morning: she made coffee, the one ritual that never failed to give her comfort. When she had a cup in hand, she called the Lamar Boulevard Self Storage to find out when the gates opened. A recorded message told her Sunday hours were from ten to six.

  She had two hours to kill, so she brought in the papers that had accumulated outside during the past three days. She scanned the American-Patriot for news of the Emily Bickerstaff murder. The only mention was in Friday’s paper—a small article on the first page of the Metro section that identified the homeless woman and described the discovery of the body near Waller Creek by two ninth graders working on a school science project.