Southern Fried

by Cathy Pickens

  I wonder what he wrote about my being born. About my growing up. I was thankful this journal didn’t include that. That would’ve been too—intimate. Too intrusive. I’d never thought of my granddad as pained. Or introspective. Or torn about his job. He’d always seemed too wise, too much in control.

  Everyone must wrestle demons. Do I appear to contain my battles? No, surely everyone could tell I didn’t have a clue where I was going or what I should do.

  Sometime around midnight, I fell asleep on the squishy old sofa, still clutching the soft brown book.

  I didn’t wake until the next morning when a deputy I didn’t recognize came to tell me Donlee Griggs had killed himself.

  Ten

  A stringy mist rose off the still water of Cane Creek. A few hundred yards upstream from where the creek plunged into a rocky pool at the bottom of Cane Break Falls, a full contingent of Ghouly Boys crowded the bridge railing. They propped, leaned, and slumped over the metal railing, staring intently into the shroud of mist caught by the leafless branches that sheltered the creek.

  The creek, only a few yards wide, flowed shallow. The rocks under the bridge had long been a favorite summer wading spot for those who liked a hint of danger. The falls seldom posed much risk, though, unless the wader had been drinking too much. Which probably described Donlee Griggs last night.

  I didn’t see anybody I recognized, so I silently joined the onlookers. A guy sporting exuberant muttonchops recognized me as a newcomer and obliged me by providing a lecture on what we were witnessing.

  “Yep, looks like they’re getting that guy-rope tied down now, that there line run from that pine right at the head’a the falls. They’ll use that for rappelin’. Down the side there, I ’magine. Did some’a that rappelin’ myself, back in the Rangers. Can’t say I’d go outta my way to fling myself off a slickery-wet rock in this weather. No, siree.”

  He crossed his arms over his thin chest and rocked back and forth on the heels of his cowboy boots. He didn’t directly acknowledge me as his audience, but the tubby kid standing on the other side of him had turned his ample backside toward us. He’d apparently heard enough Ranger exploits to do him awhile.

  Behind us, cars crept past along the bridge. The line of cars pulling off the shoulder on either side of the bridge continued to grow.

  After a few minutes more without anyone volunteering to fill me in, I asked the whiskered fellow, “Know what happened?”

  He rocked back, then forward. “Fella jumped off’a the bridge, they said. There’s a spot’a blood right there. That deputy is makin’ sure nobody leans up into it or messes with it. See there?”

  He pointed about ten feet from where we stood. I saw some smudges on the metal railing and on the concrete, but couldn’t have sworn it was blood.

  “Isn’t the creek pretty shallow? Why would somebody jump off here?”

  He shook his head. “Don’t rightly know. I heard tell two guys ’uz fistfightin’. Started down to Tap’s. They ended up out here sometime last night or this morning.”

  I leaned cautiously over the railing for a better view. A couple of fellows in a johnboat sat next to the bridge pilings. But most of the activity focused on the top of the falls.

  “Good thing we’ve had a couple of freezes already this year,” I commented. “That creek bank’s usually choked with poison ivy.”

  “Yep.”

  “So this guy fell in, then went over the falls?”

  “Yep.”

  “Wouldn’t he have broken his neck, falling in? It’s so shallow.” I leaned over again, watching the water eddy lazily around the bridge piling.

  “Don’t rightly know,” he said. “Had a good bit’a rain lately, so, creek’s running a little high.”

  “Can’t they get to the pools a lot easier from the bottom of the falls?”

  “Yep.” He kept talking out over the edge of the bridge, acknowledging my presence with his words, but never with a glance. “They think he lodged up on one’a them ledges under the falls. So they’re comin’ down from the top.”

  “They think he might be alive?”

  “Can’t rightly say. Wouldn’t want to take a chance on a thing like that, would they?”

  “I suppose not.”

  We passed a few more companionably silent moments before I asked, “They think it was Donlee Griggs?”

  He turned to look at me for the first time, his rosy lips sucked back behind his beard. “I don’t rightly know. Is that who they say?”

  He seemed surprised that I had any gossip to share. Or that he’d missed out on some.

  The damp chill seeped down the neck of the sweatshirt I’d pulled on with my jeans. I’d neglected to put a turtleneck under it, or to grab a scarf or hat or bra.

  I wondered if the men hi the wet suits were the same ones who’d been up at Luna Lake last week. I shivered again as the vision of murky water and that rusty car floated across my memory. I wouldn’t be in a chilly place near water again without thinking about that.

  As I watched the painstaking preparations at the top of the falls, part of me wanted to dismiss this as just another harebrained Donlee stunt. But this gathering had a different feel from the one at Luna Lake—more subdued, maybe. Or more intent. The bystanders conducted themselves more like bird dogs on point than folks who didn’t have anything better to do early on Sunday before church.

  Damn Donlee’s hide. If that big idiot had jumped off the bridge, I’d—what? Look him up and give him a good swift kick in his dumpling-shaped butt?

  About the time I’d worked myself around to some serious righteous indignation, I spotted a familiar face in the crowd. Pee Vee Probert’s signature squat-legged swagger caught my attention. But when he saw me, I could’ve sworn he deliberately ducked behind somebody. And disappeared.

  I left my whiskered commentator rocking on his boot heels and dodged through the crowd. Onlookers had spilled off the narrow edging and started to fill one lane of the bridge. Passing traffic was forced to navigate the bridge single file.

  Craning my neck to catch a glimpse of Pee Vee, I bounced off a guy whose belly stretched his Damn, I’m Good T-shirt all out of shape. Then I careened right into Deputy Rudy Mellin.

  “Have you seen Pee Vee Probert?” I asked.

  Rudy hitched his pants up and nodded, not trying very hard to wipe the grin off his face. “Don’t tell me you’ve thrown poor ol’ Donlee—pardon the pun—over for that shrimp.”

  “Rudy.”

  The reprimand in my voice penetrated his sarcasm enough that he dipped his head slightly before he answered. “I was just questionin’ Pee Vee. He rode over here with me, so I reckon he’s still around.”

  “Questioning him? About what happened here?”

  Rudy studied the activity downstream before answering. “He knows something, all right. Trouble is, whatever it is, he’s lyin’ about it.”

  “And my guess is, Pee Vee’s not a very good liar.”

  Rudy pursed his lips in agreement. “So what do you think happened?”

  “What would I know? L.J. mentioned that Pee Vee and Donlee took off together yesterday afternoon. I half expected a call from the drunk tank. I sure never expected this.”

  Rudy didn’t say anything, just stared downstream. I couldn’t help notice that folks gave us a wider berth when they strolled past. A couple of kids stared back over their shoulders at Rudy. Probably admiring his gun.

  “You really think he jumped?” I asked.

  Rudy heaved his shoulders in a shrug. “Don’t know. Donlee’s not what anybody’d call bright on his best days. Drunk, who knows what he’d do. He might’ve jumped. Or been pushed.”

  “Pushed? What—you don’t mean Pee Vee?”

  He shrugged again. “He’s lyin’ about something. He twitches, his eyes blinkin’ and flittin’ around, keeps sayin’ ’You gotta believe me’ and ’If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’.’ Anybody spends that much time insisting he’s telling the truth, he’s gotta be lying. I ju
st can’t tell about what.”

  “Well, neither one makes any sense—jumping or getting pushed. How could Pee Vee get the better of somebody Donlee’s size? How’d you find out about this, anyway?”

  “Call came in to the nine-one-one dispatcher. From a pay phone down next to the auto repair shop.” He nodded toward town. “Wouldn’t give a name. Said he’d seen a big guy, a guy he knew as Donlee Griggs, throw himself off the Cane Creek Bridge. Said he was drivin’ by. And to hurry. Then he hung up.”

  I hesitated before asking, “You think this is another hoax, one of Donlee’s pranks?”

  His expression was serious and, to his credit, Rudy didn’t take the opportunity to give me a hard time about Donlee and the Luna Lake incident. That same chivalrous restraint didn’t apply, unfortunately, to Pudd Pardee.

  “Well, A’vry. Fittin’ that you should be here.” Pudd had rolled up behind us, the crowd parting around his rescue squad truck. “What a tragic end for unrequited love. Kinda like Romeo and Juliet, itn’t it? Young love denied. Well, not so young, maybe.”

  One flabby arm on the window frame, he leaned half in and half out of his truck.

  “Yeah, but Juliet killed herself,” I said. “Not the head of the county rescue squad. So that’d be another difference.”

  Pudd probably detected a tinge of sarcasm in my voice. He caressed his steering wheel and turned to Rudy.

  “Rudy, you seen Willy up here? We need him down under the bridge. He’s got dive experience and they need help mannin’ those guy-ropes they’re using.”

  Rudy shook his head. “Haven’t seen him. Sorry.”

  “Don’t reckon you could help us out there, A’vry. You bein’ the cause of Donlee’s tragic end and all. It’d make a nice photo opportunity for the newspaper.” He guffawed as he raised his hand to wave at a weed-thin fellow with two cameras hung around his neck.

  The photographer barely nodded, intent on worming his way up to the bridge railing. The crowd had grown to carnival proportions, with Pudd cast as chief clown. Before he could dazzle us with any more repartee, he tapped the accelerator enough to lurch forward, narrowly missing an elderly fellow in overalls. “There’s Willy.” He’d spotted somebody farther along the bridge, and inched off through the crowd without so much as a fond farewell.

  “I’d better be going, too,” I said to Rudy. A glance at my watch told me I’d already missed Sunday School and, no matter how quickly I moved, I’d be late to church.

  I stepped into the pew and stood beside Dad as the organist finished the chords introducing the “Doxology.” The hair on the back of my neck still felt damp, but I had managed to find both halves of the same pair of shoes at my parents’ house.

  Across the aisle, Aunt Letha leaned around Vinnia so she could give me a meaningful stare.

  During the lengthy pastoral prayer, the preacher—a newcomer to Dacus First Baptist and barely older than I am—refrained from dramatic references to any local events and, instead, focused on dramatic references to national events: crime, political hot spots, unrest, the recent elections.

  I whispered a prayer for that big dumb weirdo Donlee Griggs. Part of me fumed, certain that he’d either gotten drunk and done something stupid or stayed sober and done something stupid. The other part of me felt guilty for fuming.

  “Our Scripture lesson today comes from James’s letter to the New Testament Christians, the New Revised Standard translation.” The preacher—what was his name?—grasped the lectern with both hands and gave us a reading.

  Aunt Vinnia caught my attention from across the aisle by surreptitiously waving her hand until I noticed the movement. Of course, by then, half of three pews had noticed.

  “Lunch?” she mouthed, her eyebrows raised.

  I darted a glance at my parents. Dang, I’d forgotten to mention it to them. I shrugged and nodded. Aunt Letha leaned forward with another, sterner look. I faced forward before she decided to come over and rap my knuckles.

  “‘They are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like.’ May God bless the reading and hearing of His Word.”

  I lost the context he’d planned for those verses as Granddad’s journal entry came flooding to mind, his observations about how little we know of other people. How do other people see me? If I stared at a mirror, what would I remember when I walked away? If I knew so little of myself, how in the hell could I hope to know anything about anybody else?

  What about folks I knew well now—what had they been at other times in their lives? If I’d been my granddad’s age, would we have liked each other? When he was a young lawyer, how much of the old lawyer and judge had been there? Would he like the grown-up I’d become? Would Aunt Letha and I have been chums?

  I must have shuddered at that thought because Dad turned slightly to look at me. He caught my attention and winked.

  The service closed with one of my favorite hymns: “Count Your Many Blessings.” But the organist must have forgotten to take her Geritol. The enthusiastic young mother singing loudly in front of me nearly hyperventilated from holding the first word on each chorus.

  The usual crush headed to the door to shake the preacher’s hand and beat the Presbyterians to the cafeteria. Aunt Letha caught up with my parents and pulled them along in her undertow.

  When I got to my great-aunts’ house, I parked on the street behind a battered gold Nova that belonged, it turned out, to a widower living in the elder-care apartments across town. Mr. O’Hara, who smelled faintly of mothballs and Old English furniture polish, didn’t say much. So he fit right in between Vinnia and Hattie, where he quietly smiled around at everyone and ate his mashed potatoes, which didn’t all manage to stay inside his mouth.

  As the bowls of potatoes, gravy, coleslaw, oven-fried chicken, rolls, apple salad, and vegetables circled the table, Vinnia asked, “Avery, so how was your meeting with Harrison Garnet? Has he hired you to be his attorney? What does he want you to do? Make sure he pays you a lot. He’s richer than Zeus. And what about that awful fire?”

  “Well—”

  “Vinnia, for heaven’s sakes,” Letha said, “you can’t expect Avery to go around violatin’ her attorney-client privilege. And Harrison Garnet didn’t get rich by givin’ his money away, I can tell you that. The only one in that family who’s allowed to spend money is Sylvie Garnet. That’s why she married him, and that’s why she’s kept him around all these years.”

  “Aletha.” Hattie handed her the butter dish. “Now be careful. Let the sermon stick to you just a little while.”

  “And just what did I say? Nothing that wasn’t the word of truth.”

  Hattie didn’t miss a beat. “Preacher must be saving the part in James about taming the tongue for a later sermon.”

  Letha pursed her lips and slathered butter on a hot biscuit, but didn’t say anything else.

  “What happened to Mr. Garnet,” I asked, “that he’s in a wheelchair?”

  Vinnia made a tsk-tsking sound. “The saddest thing. He’s developed some kind of circulatory problem. He can walk some, but it’s certainly changed him a lot. He used to be such a vigorous, active man. He seems to be taking it well, though.”

  “The legs are the first to go,” Letha said. “Bud’s started having trouble getting up and down.”

  “Letha, I hardly think you can compare Harrison Garnet with your dog,” Vinnia said.

  “Don’t know why not. They’ve both got bad legs. They both can’t get up anymore without help. And they’ve both been known on occasion to wander after bitches in heat.”

  “Aletha,” Hattie scolded. “You’re digging up old history and I don’t see—”

  “You’re right. Bud hasn’t done that since I got him fixed.”

  “Those stories about Harrison Garnet are ancient history, and never were worth much credence.”

  “How can you say that? You know good and well he was engaged to Olivia Sterling when he started
keeping company with Sylvie Jones.”

  Her sisters should know better than to preach to Letha about minding her tongue; it just encourages her.

  “Aletha, they’ve been married forty years. Isn’t it time to put it to rest?”

  “And Olivia’s been single that long, practically left at the altar. Not that that’s such a bad thing, mind you.”

  “Well, it is bad, if for no other reason than that Olivia minded so much.” Vinnia sighed. “It devastated her. And to think, the whole thing was a cruel ruse.”

  “What?” I asked before another sermonette from Hattie squelched what sounded like a juicy tidbit.

  “It just breaks my heart every tune I think about it,” Vinnia said. “I so worried about Olivia at the time. Feared she might do herself harm, she was so distraught.”

  “Olivia Sterling was engaged to Harrison Garnet?” I knew Olivia Sterling as a family friend and as the high school secretary. Tall and willowy, she’d finished Winthrop when it served as a girls’ school training teachers and secretaries. She’d always been, for me, the quintessential career woman of that era. This painted her in a dramatically different light.

  “Engaged and weeks away from the wedding,” Vinnia said. “There’d been parties. Harrison’s dad had a house, one he usually rented out, for them to live in. The bridesmaids’ dresses were being made. She had her wedding gown all ready. Then Harrison Garnet shows up at her parents’ doorstep sheep-faced. Says he’s sorry, he hopes she’ll understand, but he just can’t marry her. Then he stumps off down the sidewalk and disappears into the cool spring evening.” Vinnia sighed.

  “Only to reappear days later with Sylvie Jones on his arm,” Hattie added.

  “Well, I guess those things happen,” I said, though I couldn’t see choosing Sylvie over Olivia Sterling, given the choice.

  “No, those things seldom just happen.” Letha snorted. “At least not to Sylvie. No, more likely those things are well engineered. ’Course, Harrison Garnet’s like most men—gullible and egotistical in the same, confused mix. Sylvie took him by the nose—or something—and led him down the proverbial path. Idiot fellow didn’t have sense enough to question her claim that she was pregnant. Reckon he figured out she lied to him when it took Harry Junior another four or five years to be born.”