All the Dead Lie Down

by Mary Willis Walker

  “Well, you’ve got some of the story right, but you’re handicapped. See, you’re so sure of your assumption that it keeps you from seeing the truth. This is a bad problem for a writer, honey,” he said gently, “and for a human being who’s almost forty-five. You might need to work on that some.”

  “What assumption?”

  “That Vern was murdered. It’s gotten in your way.” He stood up straight. “Let’s do this together, Molly. You tell me what you’ve reconstructed and I’ll steer you back on track when you go astray.”

  She thought about it. “Okay. Daddy gave Harriet the dirty work of breaking the news to Rose, the news that he was in love with Franny and he was going to marry her. He had decided he could never see Rose alone again. It was over. It was finally over. He was too weak to tell her himself, so he had his sister do it for him.”

  She looked up at Parnell for confirmation. He nodded.

  “Rose must have been devastated,” Molly continued. “She told Harriet she was going to go see Daddy at Lake Travis and make him change his mind. Harriet called her brother to warn him Rose was coming. That would be the phone call that Franny remembers, the one that changed him so much, that sent him into a tailspin.”

  Parnell was nodding, his face expressionless. But suddenly Molly saw something she had missed over the years, probably because it had happened so gradually: the downward sagging of his eyes, his cheeks, his mouth had molded his face into a permanent expression of extreme grief—a mask of tragedy. Parnell was a man in perpetual mourning.

  She looked away from him. “I suppose when Rose got there she pleaded with him to run away with her, or she said she’d tell you about it and get a divorce—something like that. She couldn’t stand for it to be over because she loved him.” She looked at Parnell for confirmation.

  He cleared his throat. “You aren’t being sufficiently melodramatic, sweetheart. Your version is too rational and restrained.”

  “Oh?”

  He leaned forward and rested his forehead against the polished granite of the monument. After a moment, he spoke. “Rose said she couldn’t live without him—literally. She said if he went ahead with his plan to marry Franny and break with her she’d kill herself. And he had to take it seriously, Molly, because she’d made two attempts before, when he’d tried to break it off.”

  “Suicide attempts? Rose? I never knew about any suicide attempts.”

  “Well, it’s not the sort of thing one shares with children. Rose was hospitalized both times. I believe one time we called it a miscarriage, and another time we called it pneumonia. At the time I didn’t understand why she was doing it. I thought it was depression. I didn’t know it was her response to Vern’s attempts to end their affair.”

  Molly looked at him, amazed. “No wonder he was so anguished that week. He was torn between Franny and Rose. He’d broken off the engagement, but Franny wouldn’t accept that, and Rose was threatening to kill herself. He was in torment. He didn’t know what to do. Even Harriet couldn’t help him.”

  “And you know where I was?”

  She shook her head.

  “I was right here in Austin, working. The legislature was in session,” he said through tight lips. “I was busy carrying on the affairs of state, all puffed up and self-important. I had no idea—no idea—this drama was unfolding. I didn’t know it was about to slide downhill into tragedy. I didn’t know all this passion was loose in the world. I didn’t know it would kill your father and blight all our lives forever. I thought Rose was in Lubbock tending to her sick mother. There is no end to the things I didn’t know.” He took a deep breath. “Might as well go on with your story, Molly.”

  “Well, as Franny describes it, this agony went on for a week. There were calls to Harriet and attempts to get him to a doctor. Then, on the last day—” Molly stopped, unable to go any further.

  “Now, Molly, open your mind. Let go of those preconceptions.” Parnell was staring straight ahead, as if in a trance. “Close your eyes, sweetheart, and you’ll see what happens next.”

  Molly closed her eyes, but she couldn’t see anything at all.

  “Come on, Molly, you’re a writer and you’ve been trying to write this scene for twenty-eight years. Here’s your chance. Use what you’ve found out and what I’ve told you. Trust me—I’ve told you nothing that isn’t true. Use it. Tell me what you see happening.”

  Molly pictured the old houseboat, tied up at the rickety dock at Old Gun Hollow. She smelled the slightly fishy, oily smell of the lake and heard the water lapping around the hull. On the deck sat the two aluminum folding chairs and the plastic table that always had a coffee cup on it. Inside was his office, the most wonderful, romantic office she’d ever seen—a houseboat office full of books and photographs, his old Underwood typewriter, his coin collection. She could picture Vernon Cates in there drinking bourbon and trying to figure out how to save himself from the mess he’d gotten into. But that was as far as she could go; she couldn’t see what happened next.

  She shook her head.

  “Think Romeo and Juliet,” Parnell said. “An aging Romeo and Juliet, to be sure, but they had been lovers even back then, you know, when they were teenagers.”

  She had been visualizing murder as part of this scene for so long, she couldn’t picture anything else. “I can’t.”

  He took a deep breath. “Rose has been staying nearby at a motel for six days. She hasn’t gone to the house because you’re there, Molly, and they are determined to keep this from you. She comes to the houseboat every day, arguing with him, begging him to change his mind and go away with her. She swears she’ll kill herself if he abandons her, and this time she’ll do it right. Vern is a wreck. Franny is coming by and calling every day too. His women are driving him crazy. He’s always been fragile, Molly, and now he is breaking down.”

  He paused. Even with her eyes closed Molly could tell he was having trouble catching his breath. “Okay, Molly. You take it from here. Vern arrives at the houseboat that last day to try to get some work done. Can’t you just see him in his work clothes—his old jeans and boots—driving up in that battered white Chevy pickup? But when he gets there, someone’s already at the boat. Who is it?”

  “Rose?”

  “Yes. Rose. Describe the scene for me.”

  “He pulls up to the dock,” Molly said, seeing his long legs in the faded jeans as he slides down from his truck, hearing his boot heels strike the wooden dock. “He’s been drinking steadily all week and he has a flask of bourbon in his pocket. He walks out to the boat. He finds Rose there.”

  “Yes. And what has Rose done?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Romeo and Juliet, honey.”

  Molly saw it now: Rose’s slender body crumpled on the deck, her shining dark hair loose and spilling over her pale face. “She’s tried to kill herself.”

  “Yes. She’s done it. She’s taken sleeping pills again, just as she threatened, and she’s lying dead on his deck. Can you see it?”

  She could see it now, all too well. In a hot panic Vern runs to her—his longtime lover, the wife of his best friend. He kneels down over her and he lifts that delicate wrist of hers, the perfectly manicured hand, but her skin is cool and he can’t find any pulse at all. It’s too late. He is sure she is dead.

  “How does he feel, sweetheart?” Parnell asked.

  Molly heard his moaning, saw him bent down over the body, sobbing. “He feels he’s killed her. The worst thing in the world has happened. He’s to blame and he can’t stand it.”

  “That’s right. He can’t live with it, can’t face what’s to come. So what does he do now?”

  She saw her father stand up, tears streaming down his face. He pulls the flask from his shirt pocket and takes a drink, then another. He wants out of this horror. He can’t take it, can’t bear it. “But,” Molly said, breaking out of her concentration, looking up at Parnell, “there’s no gun.”

  “Oh, yes, there is. Rose brought the gu
n with her from her mother’s house. Waving pills around is not nearly as dramatic as waving a gun around, so she brought it with her from Lubbock. She’d been carrying it around with her in her purse. Of course she didn’t use it; she was far too fond of her own beauty to do that. Even if she were going to die, and I don’t think she ever really intended it, Rose wanted to die beautiful. Especially if Vern would see her.”

  He paused, breathing heavily, before going on. “So describe it to me, Molly. You wanted the truth at all costs. Let’s look at it. What happens next?”

  Molly’s heart was hammering. She felt it all—her father’s guilt and panic and hopelessness. “He takes another drink from the flask. He feels his life is over. He puts the gun to his head.”

  “Yes. Then what?”

  Molly barely had the strength to speak. The two words come out in a whisper: “He fires.”

  “Yes, Molly, he does. But Rose isn’t dead, we know that. She wakes up, just like Juliet, and finds her lover dead. Then what does she do?”

  “She calls you, Parnell.”

  “Of course. And you know what I do, don’t you? Mr. Fix-it. I drive out there. And when I get there, I find my world has ended.”

  Molly hugged her knees tighter. She started to rock again. She was as exhausted as if she had lived through the scene herself.

  “Oh, Molly, sweetheart, you look wiped out. Shall I take it from here?”

  She nodded. A lump had grown in her throat which prevented her from speaking.

  “I drive her away from there”—Parnell’s voice was emotionless—“back to Austin, but when I get there I think of all the problems. We’ve brought the gun with us because it might be traced back to Rose’s mother, but I get to thinking about what else might be on that houseboat to link Rose to what happened there. If the truth comes out, it would ruin my political career”—his voice was raspy with self-loathing—“and we couldn’t have that, could we? So I hire this man who has been known to do dirty work before, and I get him to go out there that night and put the body in the lake. I also get him to sink the houseboat.”

  “To destroy any evidence Rose might have left,” Molly said.

  “Of course. Fingerprints, letters, whatever.”

  “But the man you hired,” Molly said, “he couldn’t resist stealing Daddy’s coin collection that was lying right out in the open.”

  “But I didn’t know that then,” Parnell said. “Not until four years later when he pawned them, and you found out.”

  “You were still worried enough to pay Crocker off, though.”

  “Sure. If Crocker’d done any investigating at all, he’d have found out Rose was there that week. So I paid him to call it suicide and let it rest. He was happy to oblige.”

  Molly sighed again and shook her head, thinking about Olin Crocker. How her futile efforts to get information from him had affected her life.

  “Amazing, isn’t it, Molly,” Parnell said as though he were reading her thoughts, “how destructive and far-reaching a lie can be—like a poison that spreads out and blights everything it touches.”

  Molly was tired beyond anything she’d ever felt before. “How do I know you’re telling the truth now?”

  “Look at me, Molly.”

  She glanced up. His face was turned toward her, his cheeks wet with tears she hadn’t known he’d been shedding. Pain and regret were etched into every crease, every pore. “Am I telling the truth?” he whispered.

  She nodded. “But this isn’t Romeo and Juliet. Because in this story Juliet ends up living happily ever after with her rich and successful husband.”

  “Molly!” Parnell shook his head. “You know better than that. This is not a melodrama, it’s a tragedy. No one lives happily ever after in a tragedy. Not after something like this. Maybe they looked happy, but they weren’t.”

  “Why not?”

  He put his palms flat against the side of the monument and leaned forward until his forehead rested against the smooth granite again. Molly knew how cool and comforting that cold stone must feel to him. “Why not?” he repeated into the stone. “Do you really think he could forgive her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you really think she could forgive herself? Don’t you think that every time they tried to make love the body of that man—his best friend, her lover—was lying there between them? Don’t you think she woke every morning sorry she hadn’t really died of those sleeping pills? Don’t you think he mourned every waking moment for his friend and the uncomplicated love he once felt for his wife? Don’t you think a secret like the one they shared was a poison eating them up from the inside, corroding her joints, weakening his heart?”

  Molly felt hot nausea rising in her throat. “I don’t think this song would sell, Parnell. A downer even by C and W standards.”

  “Too much truth for you, sweetheart?”

  Molly sighed. “Did Harriet know?”

  “I never told her and I know Rose didn’t, but I think she figured it out.”

  Molly glanced around and was surprised to see that everything looked the same—the grass, the pink granite Capitol, the clouds overhead. Her whole history had suddenly shifted. Her father, the man she had idolized all her life, had killed himself rather than face up to the consequences of his acts. He was not the man she had believed him to be. Her history, her heredity, was different from what she’d thought. Which must mean that she was not who she thought she was. She’d been so sure of things, so sure she knew, but she’d been wrong about everything.

  She would have to rethink everything in the light of this. But not now. Not right now.

  After a long silence, Parnell spoke. “Let me ask you something, Molly. You’ve gone to a great deal of trouble and sacrifice to figure this out. Are you happier now that you know?”

  “Happier? No.”

  “Well, was it worth it, then?”

  “You talk as though I had a choice.”

  He nodded, conceding her point. “So what are you going to do now?”

  There was a silence while Molly considered it. “I think what I’m going to do is this: I’m going home now and take a long bath and some pain pills ’cause my knee hurts like fury. I’ll put some ammonia on my bites and go to bed. Tomorrow I’m going to sleep late. Then I’ll go to the florist and buy a huge pot of daisies. Remember how much he loved the ones that grew along the road at the ranch? I’ll go pick Jo Beth up from work and we’ll drive out to Lake Travis to the Tech cemetery. We’ll find the grave. You know, I’ve never been there, Parnell, not once in all these years. I’ll introduce him to his granddaughter and we’ll put the daisies on his grave and we’ll say good-bye to him. And I’ll come home and go back to work. I’m way behind.”

  Parnell squatted down in front of her. He took hold of her hands. “That sounds like a real good plan, sweetheart. Say hey to Jo Beth for me. And to Vern too.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  His eyes were wet. “Now. May I ask you a favor? A hard one, one I have no right to ask.” Molly nodded.

  “Rose is sitting over there, probably wondering what we’re gabbing about over here. Do you think you could go over there and say hey to her and show her you survived your ordeal mostly intact? When she saw you all bunged up and covered with mud this morning, she was real worried.”

  Molly was stunned by the request. He was asking her to perform an act of forgiveness that was light-years beyond her.

  He leaned his head down and kissed the bandage on her knee. “Remember, Molly, when you were little, how you’d go around getting everybody to kiss your boo-boos to make them better? Well, I wish I could kiss this terrible wound of yours and make it go away. But I can’t. You have to heal it yourself.”

  During all the twenty-eight years she had searched for the real story of her daddy’s death, Molly Cates had been certain that at the end there would be justice, punishment, and revenge. Never for a moment had she considered the possibility that forgiveness might be what was waiting at
the end of the journey.

  But now, as she thought about Rose and Parnell living all these years with the poisonous aftermath of her father’s death, she found her anger melting away, her bitterness drying up. What she had really needed was an ending to the story. And now she had one. It was an ugly, painful ending, and she hated it, but she could feel already that in time she would come to accept it.

  When she had mustered the energy, she stood up. “Tell you what, Parnell.” She took hold of his arm. “Let’s walk over there and see if Rose needs some help feeding the squirrels. That okay with you?”

  OLD ROGER IS DEAD AND LAID IN HIS GRAVE,

  LAID IN HIS GRAVE, LAID IN HIS GRAVE;

  OLD ROGER IS DEAD AND LAID IN HIS GRAVE,

  HUM HA! LAID IN HIS GRAVE.

  —MOTHER GOOSE

  “We didn’t even need to bring the daisies.” Jo Beth settled the pot amid the long grasses next to the headstone.

  Molly looked around the small cemetery. Everywhere clusters of radiant white daisies had sprung wild out of the scrubby soil. “He’s growing his own,” she said.

  “Aunt Harriet picked this place, didn’t she?” Jo Beth stood on tiptoe, shading her eyes against the bright sunlight. “You can even see the lake. It’s perfect.”

  Molly hunkered down at the grave. “It is perfect.” The pink granite stone was simple but finely carved—Harriet’s understated good taste. Just his name and his birth and death dates.

  “You still haven’t explained why now,” Jo Beth said, squatting down next to Molly. “I’ve been bugging you to do this for years, but you wouldn’t. Then you kidnap me from work to come here today. Something’s happened.”

  “I’ve decided to end my period of mourning.”

  “No more vigils?”

  “No. I’ve done my last one.”

  “Really? You mean it? You’re finished?” Jo Beth’s voice was excited and barbed with incredulity.

  “Yes.”

  “Wow. What’s happened?”

  “It’s a long story. I’ll tell it to you at lunch.”

  Jo Beth stood up and brushed the dirt off her skirt. “About time.”