by Trey Holt
“She’d already laid her head on her little bag and settled into the chair,”Carolyn Beatty said. I couldn’t a’stood it if Patty Ann was like that…and nobody didn’t help her.”
“Who’s Patty Ann?” asked Lucky.
“Our daughter,”said Ike.“She’s at work at the dairy dip. She’s a senior in high school.”
“I jus’couldn’t stand to see somebody with no place to go. I’ve always been that way,”Mrs. Beatty said.“My sister and me…when we was little, we was adopted out. Bounced from place to place. until one nice lady finally kep’us. It’s amazin’we still know each other. If I hadn’t still knowed her, then Eugene wouldn’t have had no place to go. Funny how things work out like that, ain’t it?”
Lucky nodded his head more out of politeness than anything else, I figured. Snuffed his dying cigarette out and lit another one.“So…how long did she stay with y’all?”
“Jus’a few days,”said Mrs. Beatty.“Maybe a week at the most.”
“Mama, I think it was longer than a week,”said Eugene, staring at the posthumous pictures of Rosa Mary Dean.“I tell you why I think that.‘Member, she went down to Franklin then. Said she was goin’down there, lookin’for a job or somethin’. She was a waitress where she come from.‘Member that? She was tellin’us how good’a money she made doin’that.”
“I do‘member that,”said Mrs. Beatty.“I‘member that‘cause she told us that she growed up in a’orphanage. I‘member that really tugged on my ole heart strings.”
Lucky again nodded.“Do you know any other reason she went to Franklin, I mean, besides lookin’for a job?”
“I ain’t sure,”said Mrs. Beatty. Ike concurred. They both turned their eyes to Eugene.
“I don’t know neither.”
“I bet y’all don’t know where she stayed either, do ya?”
“Can’t say I‘member that either,”said Ike.“It’s been a long time, Mr. Hall.”
Lucky smiled at his politeness, looked at the notes he’d recorded. Would tell me on the way back to Franklin that he thought they told him all they knew. That he didn’t think Eugene had a thing to do with anything that had happened.
“I think y’all for your time,”he told the Beatty’s and Eugene Johnson as he stood in the doorway.“Y’all are comin’on down there in jus’a few minutes, right?” he asked them.
They nodded and offered their hands.“You sure it’s awright if Eugene don’t come. I want him to be able to get on his homework.”
“Yes ma’am, that’s fine,”Lucky told her.“As long as y’all are kind enough to come.”
“We plan to,”said Mr. Beatty.
“Can your daughter come with ya?” Lucky asked as we were halfway to the car.“I know she might be tired, but the more people we can get to say it was her, the better off we’ll be. Once you give somebody a’identity, you can’t take it back.”
+ + +
“Once you’ve got a’identity, you can’t take it back,”Lucky said an hour and a half later, like he hadn’t already said two or three times.
She just got the goddam identity a little while ago, I thought, his comment sticking in my own throat like a piece of food choking me. Almost muttered it under my breath, but realized Dr. Guppy would hear me. His presence was one of the few that somehow silently called you to be ashamed of the your worst self, like he didn’t have one. He looked at his watch and smiled.
“They did say they were coming, right?” asked George Preston, holding the cigarette the way that identified him as“queer”to the rest of the town, at least those who admitted we had one.
“Mrs. Beatty said she was gonna fix the boy supper and then they was gonna be right down.”
“They might be waitin’on their daughter,”I said. The sound of my own voice almost scared me. Seemed hollow and shaky.
“Are you sure they had good directions?” George Preston asked.
Lucky smirked, cut his eyes to Johnny Guppy like maybe George Preston didn’t think straight or right. I could feel the emptiness of my own stomach. Since we hadn’t eaten supper, Lucky had promised we’d go to Datson’s after we were done.
At seven o’clock in the evening, Lucky met the Beatty’s along with Patty Ann at the front door after the sound of their car alerted they were there. He brought them in and made the introductions, then had them follow us in the squad car as we made our way toward the clinic Dr.Guppy had opened in the early fifties, so and simply named the“Franklin City Clinic.” Somewhere between a doctor’s office and a hospital, Lucky had described it to me, and alsodoubling as the city morgue. In the darkness of the alley behind the building one block south of Main Street, Dr. Guppy opened the door with the click of a key and we all entered. Mrs. Beatty took Lucky’s arm with one hand, her husband’s with the other.
Down a corridor Dr. Guppy led us, until we were at a doorway that gave berth to a room not much bigger than a closet. On a gurney, wrapped and zipped in a bag, was Rosa Mary Dean. The woman who now had a name. Lucky let Mr. and Mrs. Beatty and their daughter stand in the front just behind Dr. Guppy. He shook his head at George Preston; George Preston frowned.
“Before we go any farther,”I heard Mrs. Beatty tell Lucky,“Ike and I got to tell you somethin’that we didn’t know till Patty Ann come home. I know it’s hard to believe, but somehow she’d missed the whole thing. I know Portland’s not but thirty or forty miles away from here, but for a sixteen year old girl, I guess it’s like a different world. Miss Dean come by there whilst we was gone and talked to Patty Ann for a little bit. Ain’t that what you told us when we tole you where we was comin’tonight, baby?”
“Yes ma’am,”said Patty Ann. She flashed a crooked-toothed, pretty smile and turned her eyes to the floor.“She come by last Saturday night, I believe. Wadn’t that when you and Daddy had gone to the bar?”
Carolyn Beatty nodded her head, cast her gaze to the floor as well.
“That’s when she come then. Y’all hadn’t been gone long. I remember when she knocked on the door, I thought it was Bubba, done locked hisself out again.”
“She calls her cousin Eugene Bubba,”Mrs. Beatty explained.
“Yeah, I thought it was him,”she said.“But when I opened the door, it was Mary Rose, and—“
“I thought you said her name was Rosa Mary,”said Lucky.
“Sometimes she called herself one…sometimes another. Ain’t that right, Mama?”
“I don’t rightly remember, hunny. But go ahead, finish what you’re sayin’.”
“Anyway—Mary Rose, or whatever her name was, said she was lookin’for you and Daddy. Well, when I tole her you wasn’t there, she looked kind’a sad and said that she hoped she could catch y’all. I tole her y’all was gonna be back in a little while, and she said she’d probably come back. Then she knocked on the door again and handed me a note.”
“She left you a note?” Mrs. Beatty inquired.
“Yes ma’am…the best that I recollect.”
“And where is that note, sweety?”
“Prob’ly still in my pocket book,”she said.“I was fixin’to go with Juanita to the picture show, so I didn’t think no more about it. I guess that’s why I didn’t think to say she come by.”
“Have you got your pocket book with ya, Patty Ann?” Lucky asked.
“Yessir,”she nodded. She dug through the contents of her purse until she produced it.
Lucky took the note from Mrs. Beatty’s shaking hand after Patty Ann had handed it to her. Heput it in his shirt pocket along with the polaroids.
Dr. Guppy took the few steps between them and the bag and began to unzip it.“We’re going to bury her tomorra’, right George?” he asked.
“As long as the city’s going to cooperate,”answered George Preston.
“We already got the plot lined up,”said Lucky.
“No disrespect intended at all,”said George Preston,“But I really need to get home. I’m expecting a call. Would you believe I ran into Michael today. Well, I really didn�
��t run into him. I’d called him about the carpet. And he said he’d be happy to help me. He said he’d call me tonight and let me know when he could come down. If I don’t get home, one of my nosey neighbors’ll pick up the party line.”
“I just appreciate your help, George,”said Dr. Guppy.“Tell Michael hello if you talk to him. Haven’t seen him in awhile. He’s that boy that used to help you with your work, isn’t he?”
George Preston nodded his head, shook my father’s hand and disappeared out the door.
“You know your way out, don’t you, George?” Dr. Guppy called behind him.
From the darkness outside the room in which he stood, he answered that he did.
+ + +
As a matter of course, I guess, at least two people had to identify the body. Patty Ann had been an extra. Yet, the only one who had actually seen her that night. It just made sense, I assume, that Lucky asked her to do first what it was obvious nobody wanted to do.
She stammered as she tried to speak her protests.“I-I-I-don’t-wan–“
“Can’t we look at her first?” Mrs. Beatty asked.“I mean....”
“I know, ma’am,”Lucky said.“Like I told you back there at your house, I got a daughter right about your girl’s age. I wouldn’t want her to have to see her first…or really to have to see her at all. But I need to do it by the book as much as possible…and the way it’s s’posed be done is that the last person to see‘em should be the one to do the identifyin’first.”
As Lucky’s words rolled off his tongue a little easier and quicker, I thought the cause must surely be the bottle he’d been nursing on the way to the police station from Portland.
“I don’t want to!” Patty Ann shrieked.“I’ll be damned if I’ll look at her.”
Mr. Beatty looked at her like he was perhaps used to this kind of behavior.“Baby, Mr. Hall says you got to. I don’t see that you have a real choice.”
Patty Ann burrowed her head into Mrs. Beatty’s shoulder, muffling the sounds of her cries.
Lucky stepped forward to the bag and pushed at the space Dr. Guppy had opened earlier.“Just a look, hunny.” He placed his hand on her quivering back.“You don’t have to look long. Matter a’fact, if you can even just look at her face. John, can you cover everythin’but her face? Do you think you could look at her face and tell me if it’s the girl who come to your house Saturday?”
“Yes,”she was able to speak between the sobs from her mother’s armpit.
As Lucky pulled the bag open andher face was exposed one last time, I prayed I would not have to look upon it again later. That the death that had taken her would be allowed to be done.
In the silence that followed, I was back to the last time we had been in the room, doing the same. Remembered that precious Jean had gotten out of it, that I had gotten the shit duty that time, too. Lucky began to cough, so hard the third or fourth time he had to remove himself. I wondered if he, like I, was remembering. I could hear him gagging in the hall. Dr. Guppy moved his eyes to mine only briefly, shook his head, then turned his attention back to the Beatty’s.
“Is it her?” he asked.“Is that the woman you remember? That came to your house?”
“Yes,”she said, having turned her face to Rosa Mary’s long enough to tell.“That’s her.”
As Lucky made his way back into the room, Mr. and Mrs. Beatty made their way to the gurney. Dr. Guppy finished unzipping the bag and they stepped close as Patty Ann surrendered the space she had taken. She stepped by me and smiled coyly, blank-eyed.as she sniffed and dried her tears. Lucky placed his hand on my shoulder and stood in the doorway for a moment, watching as Mr. and Mrs. Beatty nodded. Quietly, he pulled the note from his pocket and held it far enough away from him that he could read it. I would do the same after he removed himself from Datson’s an hour later, so that he would not disturb the few other people in their as he coughed once more until he gagged himself, unable to finish his dinner of fried chicken, mashed potatoes and green beans, his favorite.
Dear Ike and Aunt Care,
I was so hoping that I’d be able to find you. It had been so long since I’ve talked to you that I thought I would come to see you in person. A lot has happened since the last time I was here. It seems that my luck has kept on the way it has been most of my life. When I left here the last time, I thought the best thing to do was go back to Indianapolis, but after the way everything turned out, I guess I was wrong. I probably didn’t tell you when I was here the last time that my parents had died. Or maybe I did tell you that. Anyway, I went back to Indiana because I thought I should be able to help raise my sisters, and I got married to man named Andy Dean, who said that he would help me raise my sisters because my parents was dead. He got him a good job with a trucking outfit and was learning how to drive one of them big rigs. Just as he was learning how to drive it, though, he got in as wreck and it kilt him. Worse than that, though, was that he had got me pregnant the year before, right after we got married and I give birth to twins. One of them didn’t make it out and was born what they call still, and the other one only lived a few days. So, then all we had was my sisters again. Then when Andy died—sorry, got to go, the train is stopping and Im going to get off and use the bathroom and walk around.
Okay, I’m back. Let’s see, where was I? When Andy died, I thought that I could raise my two sisters by myself, Ella and Mira, but they didn’t seem to cotton to me trying to raise them. They just give me trouble all the time. They wouldn’t do what I said. I told them that they was going to end up in reform school just like I had been if they didn’t straighten up and fly right but they didn’t seem to care and they just kept on going down the wrong road. They was like I had been nothing but trouble since Mama and Daddy passed away. I told them though that they at least had me and that I could help them be a different way. And I tried. I mean I tried, tried like you all had with Eugene. Maybe you all was my inspiration, the way you had been so nice to him and took him in like he was one of your own like Patty Ann. In the long run, I bet you all have helped him. At least last time I talked to you it seemed like you had. How long has it been? I ain’t sure accept to say its been longer than it should be. I guess I haven’t talked to you all but once or twice since I left there in 1949, it was 49 wasn’t it? Anyway, I been writing off and on since I come back from the bathroom as thoughts come to me that seemed like something you should know. I hope that I find you home and I don’t have to leave this note, but if you do get this note then it means that I didn’t get you and I’ll see you in a couple of days. If you’re not home I may go on down to Franklin, but I’ll be back, probably the next day.
Lucky spoke from behind me. Scared me so bad I almost pissed in my pants.
“Sir?”
He was wobbling now, the initial levity from his drinking having passed into its own shackles and chains. He made his way up behind me and sat at the table.“I said that that goddam note is somethin’else, ain’t it?” he wheezed as much as spoke.
“Yeah, I have to say that it is,”I told him.
There were dark circles under his eyes as he covered the lower part of his face with one of his hands, supported the weight of his head with it. He shook his head and sighed. Wheezed.“You think we’re gonna get the weather they been talkin’about?”
“I don’t know,”I told him.“I hope we don’t. I tell ya, it makes it hard to throw papers.”
“If we get it tonight, you can take the car in the mornin’.”
I could feel the sting of his boots on my ass. The warmth of the blood from my lip making its way down my face. The embarrassment of the source of the physical pain. Wondering who if anybody had seen it. Swore at the same time that I didn’t give a shit.
“I’m bettin’that it just turns off to rain,”he said. He rubbed his face with both of his hands, placed his chin in them and rested his elbows on the table.
Chapter Twenty-Four
It had begun to snow on a Thursday morning and continued past noon and through the d
ay. For a little while, it let up as darkness hinted at coming, then came again as the light failed. The flakes were the biggest things I’d ever seen, each somehow like the last but at the same time brilliant in its individual nature. Under the porch light, they drifted onto the concrete to remain intact for only a moment then to blend or dissipate, never to be seen again. On this night, the iridescent glow of the television had been absent from the window, ours and the Pitts’. All up and down the street, people gathered in their windows, families of three and four and five and six, to watch the half-dollar sized flakes make their way from the heavens in swirling paths to the ground or a tree or some other final resting place where they became part of the mass beginning to accumulate.
Through the night and into the next morning it snowed, well over a foot finding its way to the ground. Pristine in its envelope of the countryside, there was not one place disturbed as far the eye could see. Not one footprint, not one car track. The only movement was as the flakes continue to waft from the sky.
I had been awake what I guess was an hour, lying on the bed that had been empty the balance of the night, listening to the silence that only a snowfall can bring. Wondering if he was ever coming home.“Home,”I thought. His home, the real one, I guess, had been with Horace and Lera, on the Hall Farm, where they grew corn and tobacco and beans and raised cows and pigs. Perhaps, though, he had no home now. Or maybe his home was on that goddam ward he’d been stuck in for going on seven months.“At least the treatments have become more infrequent,”he’d tell me.“Only one a week now as long as I tow the line. Act good.”
But towing the line and acting good had been difficult for him. As the country settled into the last few months of the war and began to accept that not only its landscape but the landscape of the entire world had somehow been irretrievably altered, he had read the paper religiously. Digested every piece of information that he could arrest with his hands.