Mallie sat close to Popeye, leaving room for Larry on the other side of a large rip in the old plastic seat covering, a dangerous spring about to poke through. A ride from hell, Mallie remembered from all her previous experiences. Bumps all the way. The narrow dirt road into the hunting area was rutted with water-filled potholes, and none of the pickups had much suspension or padding.
“You have enough room?” Larry asked.
“Fine,” she said without looking at him. As if he really cared, she thought. She wondered why she had decided to go out. She could have slept in with the other women. Habit, maybe. It was what she had always done.
“How do you feel about that Georgia peanut farmer winning the election and becoming President of the United States?” Larry asked Popeye.
“He’s okay with me,” Popeye said. “I like his talk and they say he can catch a big brim just looking at the water.”
Mallie knew her husband and her father had nothing but disdain for Jimmy Carter’s liberal views. Sam Malcolm had been a staunch Southern Democrat until LBJ and the civil rights legislation. Sometime in the early seventies he switched to being a Republican. Larry’s Rhode Island family had always been Republican. She knew Popeye’s declaration of support for Jimmy Carter would end Larry’s conversation with him about politics.
At a juncture in the road, the trucks separated, each guide taking a different route toward a particular pond. A single jon boat would be pulled up into the high grass at a place of entry.
“In you go, Mallie,” Popeye said. He held her hand and led her toward the metal strut in the bow of the boat. “In the middle, sir,” he directed Larry. He had not known Larry for all the years that he had known Mallie. She suspected that all the guides had some reservations about her husband’s being a Yankee.
“Get on in there, girl.” He popped Dory, his black Labrador retriever, on the backside, pushing her toward the space in the bottom of the boat between them. He shoved the long aluminum boat off the bank, jumped in and knelt onto the rear strut. On the fourth tug of the motor cord from his muscular right arm, the nine-horse-power Evinrude outboard spluttered and roared, then settled into a loud purr. He sat down, steering the long handle, and threading his way slowly through the canals into the open water.
Paradise leased thousands of acres of flooded land each year. Rice, millet and milo grew like weeds, creating the perfect feed for the ducks and the occasional geese flying south from Canada for the winter. Patches of woods and tall grasses provided the covering for the blinds. Decoys were carefully placed in small clusters in the open water to seduce the ducks into range in front of them. The idea was for the hunters to be tucked into the blinds just before sun-up. The guides usually stood close by on a high spot in the woods and did the calling. The real lure was the sound of a master duck caller. Popeye could blow that small wooden cylinder loud enough to break a flock of ducks flying in a V formation some six hundred yards away. If they started to come in and circle, he could perfectly mimic the low wobble of a duck feeding, guttural sounds like a man drowning.
After Mallie and Larry were settled into the blind, seated on the wide wooden bench across the back, Larry pulled out his thermos of hot coffee. “Want some?” he asked.
She shook her head. She tried not to drink anything in the blind. It was too much trouble to deal with all of the layers of clothes in the woods if she had to pee.
He took a flat silver flask of brandy out of his inside pocket and poured it into the steaming coffee mug. “This should warm things up,” he said. “Sure you don’t want any?”
“No, thanks.” She thought of the countless mornings that she had sat in the same spot with her father, watching him slug bourbon from a nearly identical flask. Sometimes he didn’t bother with the coffee.
She propped her 20-gauge shotgun against the seat between them and leaned forward in the blind. Through the wide opening, where they could spot the ducks flying high in the sky, and from which they would fire at the unsuspecting birds, she watched the soft pink light rising above the horizon line. It was her favorite time of the early morning hunt, the peaceful beginning before a shot was fired. In her art classes at school, she had painted the scene many times.
“Single circling,” Popeye said, his voice a raspy whisper between calls.
Mallie lowered her head, reaching gingerly for her gun. Any quick movement or an exposed human face too close to the opening could spook a duck. A single was particularly skittish.
From beneath her hat brim, she followed the duck’s flight path with her eyes, around and around again—then as Popeye switched seamlessly from his high, bleating calls to the low gurgling, feeding sounds, she heard the duck’s wing-flapping descent toward the middle of the decoys. She would wait for Larry to shoot first. She had never really enjoyed firing her gun.
“Take it, Mallie.” Larry abruptly whispered to her.
Without thinking, she stood and raised her gun to her shoulder. The mallard in her sight, she pulled the trigger twice. The duck twitched, falling to one side—then the splat of impact indicated a dead hit. A second later, its dark body splayed out on the surface of the water, the duck tried to flap one wing and lurched slightly forward.
“Oh my God,” Mallie said. “It’s still alive.”
It had always been her horror to cripple a duck. On her first hunt she had been sick to her stomach when her father had wrung a wounded duck’s neck in front of her. “Far kinder to kill it instantly,” her father had said.
The more the struggling bird tried to move away, the more miserable Mallie felt. It was as if she herself were the wounded creature. She willed it to get up and fly away. Please God, make it fly. But she knew that was not possible. The lone drake—its metallic green feathers designating its male sex—had trusted the compelling sound of Popeye’s duck calls and been fooled by the benevolent sight of the decoys. It had been mortally wounded by her hand.
“Get ’em, Dory,” Popeye ordered his lab. The dog splashed into the water with all four feet and paddled toward the doomed duck.
Mallie turned away as Dory swam back across the open water to Popeye with the limp bird locked in her mouth.
“Good girl,” Popeye said, taking the duck in his hand and warning Mallie not to look. Quickly and soundlessly, he wrenched its neck and tossed the lifeless body on the ground behind him.
Mallie sat back on the bench and put her gun down. “You take the rest,” she said to Larry without looking at him. “I’m finished.”
“What’s the matter, peachie?” he said. “You’ve seen cripples before.”
“I’ve had enough,” she said. She didn’t want to explain that she felt a part of her was lying on the ground.
Larry eventually killed three more mallards to reach their legal limit of keepers for the day. All three of them got into the boat to head for the truck. Popeye dropped Mallie and Larry off at Paradise and took the ducks home with him to have them picked, tagged and bagged for the Voses’ trip back to Memphis.
Ben and Gus had finished early and were already drinking Bloody Marys and telling tales of the morning’s shoot. The two women who had slept in were playing gin rummy, waiting for Cindy and Mallie to start the afternoon bridge game. Complaining of a headache, Mallie told her friends she needed to take a nap and that she would join them later.
Her room was still dark with the blinds closed. She crawled under the quilt with her clothes on to hide, to sleep, to forget. But her mind would not leave her alone. There seemed to be no answers to her badgering questions about Larry, her frustration with Father Matthews. She had counted on the priest to help her. Jenny had said he was a wonderful, wise counselor. There was no wisdom in telling Larry that their marriage problems were about communication. Over and over she replayed the record of Larry’s lies. She heard the woman’s voice on the phone, thought about the suicide attempt. All of Mallie’s fears collided like dodge-em cars in her head. Finally she slept.
As if an electrical jolt had woken her, she
had an idea. On Monday morning, she would call Father Matthews and make an appointment to see him by herself. She would tell him everything Larry had obviously neglected to tell him. She would make him understand what was really going on in their marriage. Surely then he would see the real picture and help her. She nestled down into the soft mattress, knowing that she could get through the rest of the weekend.
Chapter Six
Monday morning, after Larry left for work and the boys had gone to school, Mallie phoned St. Michael’s Episcopal Chapel. It was close to ten before the priest returned the call.
“Mallie, it’s Tom Matthews,” he said in a courteous, steady voice. “What can I do for you?”
Accumulated anger caused tightness in her throat; she wanted to accuse him: You’ve already done enough damage. Instead, she said, “Thanks for calling me back.” She hesitated, then spoke carefully, “I need to see you, Father Matthews. I’d like to see you alone before Larry and I come for counseling together.” She tried to sound calm.
“Of course,” the priest said. “That’s a good idea. Any chance you could come in this afternoon?”
She felt a rush of relief. “Yes,” she said quickly.
“How about two o’clock?” he said. “And, by the way, Mallie, please call me Tom.”
“I’ll be there,” she said. “Thank you.” She hung up the phone and tossed her head, feeling her mane of dark brown hair swishing just above her shoulders and settling back in its natural pageboy. The tension in the muscles of her face released, her rigid spine bent in a gesture of gratitude. Thank God, she thought, she would have her chance to set things straight.
St. Michael’s Episcopal Chapel was tucked into a wooded lot in Victorian Village, an area of historic preservation in Memphis. Located near the medical center, it remained one of the only downtown residential neighborhoods in the mid-seventies still standing from the fifties blitz of urban renewal. To a casual observer, it was difficult to tell that the building was a chapel. Without the small pewter cross that was mounted next to the front door, the low modern rectangular structure could have been a residence. The sanctuary faced the back yard. To an architecture buff, the design was at least a century out of sync with its stately rococo Victorian neighbors. In further contrast to their manicured lawns and gardens, the grounds of the chapel were often neglected and overgrown.
St. Michael’s had been conceived by Bishop Wagner, the progressive bishop of the West Tennessee diocese, to fill a need, as he saw it, for medical students and faculty who wanted pastoral counseling, and who, over time, might choose to attend Sunday services—perhaps even to join Episcopal confirmation classes. It was said that he had brought the Reverend Thomas Matthews in from a parish in Indiana. In less than two years of operation, both the chapel and its chaplain had developed a respected, albeit theologically liberal, reputation.
As Mallie walked through the front door, a woman she assumed was the chaplain’s secretary looked up from her desk and smiled.
“You must be Mallie Vose,” she said. “I’m Terry. Tom’s got someone in his office, and he’s running a little late.” She was a pert, carrot-haired woman with a pencil stuck behind her ear. A pair of green hightop tennis shoes on her feet stuck out from under the desk. “Won’t you have a seat? Can I get you a Coke?”
Except for the filigreed gold cross on a chain around her neck, the woman seemed an unlikely secretary for an Episcopal priest. Too casual, too much of an aging hippie. “No thanks,” Mallie said, reaching over the desk to take Terry’s hand. “Nice to meet you.”
Behind Terry’s desk a brass plate on a heavy mahogany door read Chaplain’s Study. Mallie had an instant flash of Larry slouching through that door on Friday afternoon to meet Tom Matthews—she recalled the priest asking her on the phone that morning to call him “Tom” rather than “Father.” Obviously from Larry’s behavior in the car, he had walked out a completely different person.
“Mallie’s such an unusual name,” Terry said. “Is it a nickname?”
“You’re not the first person to ask,” Mallie said. “My real name is Valeria. I’m named for my grandmother and my Aunt Valeria, my father’s sister. I’ve always felt strange about the name Valeria. It sounds so formal and grownup—not like me at all. My father always said I should be honored to carry that name. My maiden name was Malcolm. A boy in fourth grade started calling me Mallie. I liked it better.”
Terry smiled. “I know what you mean. My real name’s Theresa—I’m named for a saint. Terry suits me better.” She spoke with an ease that made Mallie feel comfortable. “Valeria does sound like a lot to live up to.” She lifted her nose in mock sophistication. “But I have to say, it’s a beautiful name. Is this your first visit to St. Michael’s?”
“It is,” Mallie said. She turned to look around at the big, over-stuffed couches, the card table and the stone fireplace in the sitting room. It didn’t seem like a church at all. “I’m a member at Holy Trinity,” she added, in case Terry might question whether or not she was an Episcopalian. “May I see the sanctuary?”
“Of course.” Terry bounced up from behind her desk and ushered Mallie through the side doorway of the sanctuary.
It was small, probably no more than twelve or fourteen pews on either side of a wide center aisle, soft white walls with rough-hewn wooden beams, brick floors and a window behind the pulpit that framed the sculptural winter branches of a spreading oak tree. Mallie was touched by the simplicity and serenity. She decided to kneel in one of the back pews. It occurred to her to say a prayer.
Mallie closed her eyes and tried to let go of her skepticism of religion. What had once been so important and meaningful in her life had been on a jagged path of disillusion for years. She had been a devout Roman Catholic child. The whole Malcolm family was Roman Catholic, originally from County Clare in Ireland. Neither of her parents ever went to church except for Christmas and Easter, but as early as she could remember, her grandmother, Nannie Malcolm, had taken her to Mass on Sunday mornings. Mallie had made her First Communion when she was seven and carried rosary beads in her purse for years.
By the middle of her freshman year at Sweet Briar College, Mallie had begun to question the basic tenets of Catholicism—partially in response to her philosophy and psychology courses. Kant. Hegel. Freud. Jung. Confronting the issue of “absolute truth.” There was no way there could be “absolute truth” in such a complex world, she thought. Shortly thereafter, she began to have doubts about the divinity and the omnipotence of the Pope. So much of the Catholic teaching seemed out of sync with the modern world. The sin of birth control, of divorce. Even as she questioned what sin really was, and as remote as birth control and divorce were from her personal life, she could not see those things as punishable by God, no matter who or what God really was.
The final blow to her beliefs was struck when she spent the fall semester during her junior year in college taking painting classes at the Villa Mercedes in Florence, Italy. She was appalled by the juxtaposition of the opulent cathedrals surrounded by dingy buildings on dirty streets. All the beauty and comfort of the Catholic Church that she had so loved as a child disappeared as she watched the clusters of weary women holding bedraggled, bandaged children in their arms, begging for money on the church steps. Going into Mass one morning, she happened to see a man in a collar—was he a priest, or a man pretending to be a priest?—outside the church open a flap of his oversized black coat that held packages of cigarettes in layered pockets. Several other men surrounded him, haggling over the price. The sacredness was gone for her. She stopped going to Mass.
When she had been in Italy just long enough to feel slightly homesick, one of her roommates talked her in to going to a service at St. James Episcopal Church, known as the American Church in Florence. That morning the choir came marching in behind the American flag and the Episcopal flag, singing “God Bless America.” Tears welled in Mallie’s eyes. Instantly, she felt at home. So much of the liturgy and the prayers were the same as th
ose she knew so well from the Catholic service, but they were spoken in English. The hymns and the camaraderie afterward appealed to her. She and her roommate joined the choir, mostly made up of expat Americans. After attending the American Church nearly every Sunday while she was in Italy, it had been an easy decision for Mallie to take Episcopal confirmation classes when she returned home to Memphis. She and Larry were married in the Episcopal Church.
Through the years, and particularly after Sammy, her first child, was born, she found that Sunday morning was her only time for herself. While Larry played tennis, she could actually read a book, occasionally without interruption. Then she had two more boys. She had no time for herself, even on Sunday. When the boys were old enough to go to Sunday school at Holy Trinity, she tried going to the nine a.m. service. She began to get distracted by phrases in the Book of Common Prayer like “angels and archangels and all the company of heaven.” She could not stop the visions of adorable cupids floating around in the heavens. It all seemed so detached and superfluous. Also, she felt as if all the parishioners were the same Saturday night at the Country Club crowd dressed in their Sunday clothes. There was nothing spiritually meaningful there for her, so once again, she stopped going to church.
On her knees with her eyes closed in the quiet of St. Michael’s Chapel, the memory of her Catholic childhood devotion and the comfort of the faith she had once found in the Episcopal Church in Italy came back to her. She was aware that in the busyness of her family life, something important to her had been missing. Maybe she should try going to church again. She looked up to see Terry still standing, waiting for her in the doorway.
“Are there services in this chapel on Sunday?” Mallie asked.
“Oh, yes,” Terry said. “It’s usually filled up with nurses and medical students. Besides his pastoral counseling, Tom’s the chaplain to the University of Tennessee Medical School, you know.”
“Do other people from outside the medical community ever come to the service?”
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