by J. D. Horn
Elijah had never mentioned a girl named Ruby. In fact, he had been adamant that there was no one waiting for him stateside. The word “love” danced before Corinne’s eyes. What had the beauty been feeling when she scrawled it? Did the word signify a casual affection or a deeper emotion? Had it been intended for the Dunne family as a unit or Elijah alone? She decided to take the photograph to Ava and explain how she’d found it. How it had come to be damaged. But she couldn’t resist flipping it over, if only to study this Ruby’s features once more. Without reflecting on her actions, she returned the drawer to its runner and hid the photo beneath a stack of underwear, with the velvet bag. She closed the drawer.
Outside, she recognized Elijah’s voice, even though she was unable to make out his words. She hurried to the window, zeroing in on its source. Two men had exited the barn, and they were taking turns pumping water so that each could wash his hands, arms, and face. Ablutions complete, the men looked up at the house and started toward it.
Caught up in the sentiments conveyed by six months’ worth of love letters, Corinne surprised herself with her own enthusiasm. She bounded out the screen door and ran in the direction from which the men were coming. She had expected for Elijah to run as well, meeting her halfway to sweep her up in his arms, but he continued toward her with an unhurried pace. How foolish. As she should know better than anyone, his wound had ensured he’d never run again. She had come within ten yards of the men when she stopped in her tracks, questioning her own senses.
Of the two men coming toward her, neither was the Elijah Dunne she remembered. Even after eliminating the second man due to his age, Corinne could not convince herself that the man who’d proposed to her a mere six months earlier was the other fellow standing before her. She took a few measured steps in his direction, hoping her impression might change after a closer perusal. The younger of the two was unshaven, a thick blond beard hiding the lower portion of his face. His hair was unkempt, badly in need of cutting. His body had thickened, the middle filling out two, maybe three inches, the V-shape of his torso turning into a barrel. It was both Elijah and not Elijah; the man who stood a mere few feet in front of her was a fattened, feral version of her fiancé.
“Corinne,” he said, extending his hand, palm facing inward. The reality of the situation began to tumble in on her. The letters they had written each other over the last several months had been full of such warmth, but she’d really only known the man for less than six months . . . and that had been more than six months ago and seven thousand miles away. Now she stood here before him in a world even more alien than the battleground where they’d met, not quite believing that this was happening—that this was her future husband—and he was greeting her with a handshake. She held out her own; he gave it a quick pump and released it.
“This her?” his father asked, nodding in Corinne’s direction, as if she weren’t worth addressing.
“Yes, sir,” Elijah said.
Mr. Dunne looked her over. He disregarded her eyes, instead taking in her breasts, the width of her hips. Corinne felt like she was being appraised for purchase as livestock rather than being welcomed into the family. “All right, then. Let’s not keep your mother waiting.” The older man turned and, without a word of greeting, began trudging toward the house.
Corinne’s mouth trembled and her jaw fell open. “No, sir,” Elijah responded, but now that the old man was facing the other direction, he winked at Corinne and planted a quick kiss on her cheek. The relief that washed over her was so complete that a small gasp escaped her. “Give ’em some time. You’ll get used to them.”
“What if I don’t?” Corinne whispered.
“Well, they can’t live forever.” A lopsided smile curled his lips, and small crinkles formed around his eyes.
There, Corinne thought to herself. There he is.
NINE
Elijah followed a few steps behind his soon-to-be bride, watching her square and sturdy hips move up and down like pistons as she mounted the slight incline leading to the house. He’d hoped that seeing each other in the flesh would do something to fan the embers of their affection for each other, but she’d barely seemed to recognize him. In Korea they’d been a couple; here they were strangers. Or maybe it was only his own guilt over betraying her that made him imagine things?
He’d enlisted in the army in the hopes of returning a hero or not returning at all, but the army in its infinite wisdom decided he would best serve the cause if indentured to kitchen patrol duty, feeding the workers who staffed the olive-drab circus tent Uncle Sam chose to call a “hospital.” The greater part of his foreign deployment had seen him peeling potatoes and carrying refuse out to the garbage pit dug on the far end of camp. It was on one of these trips when a sniper caught him in the leg. He was lucky that a more essential body part hadn’t been destroyed. His buddy, who’d been a few steps ahead of him, hadn’t been as lucky.
He and Corinne had met some months before in the mess hall, just after she’d transferred in from another MASH unit. He’d spooned a cooling glop of chipped beef in gravy onto her plate, and the look of resignation in her eyes at the sight of it caused him to laugh. It was the first honest laugh he’d enjoyed in a very long time. Their eyes met, and her lips curled into a shy smile. And that was it. That was the moment when he began to think he might just survive losing Ruby.
But then, not long after he returned home, he learned he might not have lost Ruby after all. The Judge’s men had found her and brought her home.
The things folks told him had happened, the things that drove him to leave Conroy, to leave Ruby—she swore they never happened. He’d listened to the wrong voices, believed the wrong people. If only she hadn’t been so beautiful—too beautiful for him. She had so much life and spark to her. He, on the other hand, was such a dullard. He’d believed from the start that sooner or later she’d tire of him and move on, and when he heard what people were saying, well, he believed that was exactly what had happened. Both he and Ruby ended up paying for his lack of faith. He went off to Korea to get his leg shot up, and broke her heart in the process.
Then she ran off to California with Dylan Sawyer, the pretty boy from a grade behind them. She and Dylan had only been friends, though, and had gone their separate ways within weeks of reaching Hollywood. She swore it, and he believed her.
It was almost too much to bear when she started to fade away before his eyes, losing more strength each day, his hope withering along with her body. Ultimately, he could do nothing to save her. It happened so quickly, before he could even summon the courage to write to Corinne and tell her not to come. A twinge of conscience told him he should have written anyway. Explained everything and let her decide if she’d still have him. But his courage had failed him. Corinne had become his only light in an endless black tunnel.
The crunch of his boots on the water-starved east Mississippi grass pulled him back to the present moment. Yes, his loyalty had wavered, but he’d never fail Corinne again. Ruby was gone now, and a few paces before him walked his future. Their relationship would never know the razor-edged passion he’d felt for his first love, perhaps his only true love, but he’d do all he could to help resurrect the easy camaraderie he and Corinne had known before. Still, he caught himself praying it wouldn’t be Ruby’s face he saw when it came time to lie with Corinne.
She glanced back over her shoulder at him, and he did his best to muster a reassuring smile.
TEN
Marjorie’s thighs rubbed against each other as she climbed the steps that led to Mrs. Sawyer’s front door. That old sun seemed to burn hotter than it used to, frying her to a crisp in no time anymore. Sweat formed dark circles under her arms, and her underpants began to ride up and bunch. She stopped midclimb, balancing a cake carrier on her right hand and tugging at the back of her skirt with the left. The cake nearly toppled, causing her heart to thump and putting an end to her private rendition of “I’m Walking Behind You,” a song she hoped would remind Dylan of her whenever he heard
it play on the radio.
She righted her burden and padded up the last three steps onto the wide gray porch that wrapped around the Sawyer house’s front and sides. As she scooted deeper into the shade of the porch’s overhang, a flash of a well-worn fantasy hit her, the one where Dylan returned to Conroy, broken by the big city and ready to settle down once and for all. With her. She played this dream over in her mind so often, if it had been a record, the groove would have been scraped smooth.
She had another dream, though, a better one. Rather than failing in Hollywood, Dylan would shine as its brightest star. She would head over to The Strand Theater to catch his debut, and as she stood beneath the marquee admiring his name, or whatever his name would be once they made him famous, a big shiny black car would pull up alongside her. The back window would lower, and Dylan would lean out. There’d be no words. There would be no need for words. He’d smile, then sweep her away with him out to California, without even stopping so she could pack. He’d buy her all new clothes once they made it to Hollywood. She imagined the buzz at the phone company and her supervisor’s face when she called in—long distance—to quit.
But the weeks turned to months, and one year became two. Marjorie was no fool. She’d realized it was time to grow more realistic and let this latter dream slide. If Dylan were going to be a star, he’d have made it by now. She’d returned to rehearsing the more realistic scenario of welcoming the weary prodigal’s return, a choreographed soporific that carried her off each night. Hollywood hadn’t appreciated Dylan the way it should have, but the ending would still be happy, because she’d be here waiting for him. Yes, she would welcome him home with open arms and an open heart.
Then her thoughts veered without warning toward the woman who’d seduced him away in the first place. A familiar hurt rose, and she forced it back down. She had not welcomed Ruby when her supposed friend returned. It was unforgivable that Ruby, the girl who already had everything, would steal Dylan from her and lead him so far from home, so far from her and his mother who loved and pined for him.
She could feel her heart breaking all over, hot tears threatening to whelm the dam she’d built to block the pain of the betrayal. She imagined stuffing the fear and hurt into a box, no, a small coffin, a miniature of the casket Ruby had been laid in.
No, she had not welcomed Ruby home. Nor did she go to Ruby’s funeral, although she had ventured out to the cemetery to watch Ruby’s casket be locked away in the Lowell family crypt. Delmar Blount had noticed her standing at the edge of the scraggly pines that formed the graveyard’s eastern border and sidled up beside her. “Tramp the dirt down hard, boys,” he said, his words followed by a bitter laugh. “Make sure the bitch is good and buried.” Silently, he offered her a cigarette, but the gleam in his eyes warned her the smoke would come with a price. The price of something she was saving for Dylan.
She shook her head and focused on the sea of mourners. A lot of them were the Judge’s hired people, but there were a heck of a lot more regular townspeople than she would’ve expected to see. They all milled around, their attention focused either on the Judge himself or on the six pallbearers who bore the casket. “They aren’t burying her like that. She’s going into the mausoleum there, with her mama,” she said and pointed at the Lowell family crypt.
“That’s a damned shame,” Delmar said. “I’d been looking forward to thinking about the worms eating her.” He took a puff. “Reckon that Sawyer boy is gone, too. Course if he ain’t, he’s pretty much dead to Conroy anyway.” She turned on him, ready to denounce his foolish thoughts, but he carried on. “If he ever sets foot around here again the Judge will skin that pretty face off him like an apple peel.”
“The Judge is a good man,” she countered. “He knows this all was Ruby’s doing. He’d never lay the blame at an innocent man’s feet.”
Delmar’s eyes widened, and his lips curled up in a look of amusement. He started to speak, but didn’t, instead drawing another puff of his cigarette. He shook his head and slid back off through the pines. “Go on, then,” she’d whispered. “Get on out of here and take your nonsense talk with you.”
She had remained in place, though, keeping vigil until long after the crowd had taken off, and even after the sexton locked the gate to the mausoleum, giving it a good shake to make sure it was sealed. He must have questioned himself, though, because a few minutes later, an old man she recognized as Charlie Aarons came around to check it again. She fought off the urge to try the gate herself, wondering if a charmed third attempt, like in a fairy tale, would cause it to spring open. Instead, she swatted at the mosquitoes that had set on her, and took advantage of the failing light to pick her way around the graveyard and head home.
She tried to find the forgiveness Reverend Miller at Five Point Methodist preached about. It had been a bit over two months now since Ruby had been sealed away, but Marjorie’s sentiments toward her still hadn’t softened, not one whit. Maybe the problem was that Miller offered only the Methodist flavor of forgiveness. Marjorie had been raised Baptist. She’d only switched over to the Methodists since Mrs. Sawyer was the organist at Five Point.
No, the milk of Christian kindness had failed to irrigate her soul; Marjorie remained glad Ruby had died. It would make it easier for Dylan to come home, now that he wouldn’t have to suffer a living reminder of his moral lapse.
A small thrill ran through her. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if he chose today, his birthday, to come home to them? She spared a moment to let the image play in her mind’s eye; then a bead of sweat rolled down her spine and pulled her back to the white house’s wide gray porch. She balled up her left hand into a fist and rapped on the Sawyers’ hunter-green trim.
ELEVEN
“Do come in, dear,” Francis Sawyer said as she took in the perspiring mess of a woman on the other side of the screen door. Majorie’s peroxided blonde curls were matted against her forehead, her round cheeks flushed red all the way down to her downy double chin. Francis used her left hand to force the door to open, its spring screeching out in protest at the unwanted pressure.
At first Francis had found the woman a bother, showing up at her door every two or three days to inquire after Dylan, but soon she realized that Marjorie was the only other person on the earth who cared for the well-being of her beautiful boy. As the days went along, blurring one into the next, their shared vigil for Dylan’s safe return began to outweigh Francis’s concern for the woman’s obviously delusional nature.
“I brought a cake,” Marjorie said, an earnest smile on her lips. “So we can celebrate Dylan’s birthday.”
Francis did her best to feign surprise. “That’s very thoughtful of you.” It had been Dylan’s birthday—his real one—the first time loneliness drove Francis to welcome this woman into her home. That day her sense of loss led her to take Marjorie upstairs, to show her Dylan’s empty closet, let her touch the pillow where Dylan had laid his head. Now Marjorie brought a cake with her each and every visit; in her mind every day was Dylan’s birthday.
Francis watched the sad, dumpy creature shuffle over the threshold. That the woman could function well enough in her position as telephone operator seemed a miracle, considering how she seemed to spend her nonworking hours floating through some kind of dream world, a dream world that centered on Dylan.
Oh, it was true that Dylan had befriended Marjorie; both he and Ruby seemed to enjoy spending time with the old-maid telephone operator, but more than once Francis had overheard the two young folk laughing over Marjorie’s perceived romance with her son. Marjorie had to be twelve, perhaps fifteen years older than Dylan, even though she swore her age was eighteen. Francis had made Marjorie’s acquaintance three years ago, and by Marjorie’s reckoning, she was still eighteen. Francis stifled a sigh as she acknowledged that in Marjorie’s mind she would always be eighteen, just as it would always be Dylan’s birthday.
As was her habit, Marjorie stopped to consider the family photos Francis kept on the wall. But this was th
e first time she’d ever made a comment. “Mr. Sawyer was so handsome when he was young. A lot like Dylan.” She turned back to Francis. “Do you think Dylan will go bald like Mr. Sawyer did?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t think so,” Francis replied. “That kind of thing comes from the mother’s side, and all the men in my family have beautiful heads of hair.” Marjorie offered a bland, relieved smile at the assurance.
Francis followed as Marjorie took the lead to the kitchen. Marjorie stopped and looked back at her. “Buttercream frosting,” she beamed. “His favorite.”
“It certainly is,” Francis responded with a smile. It wasn’t. If it were, Francis, as his mother, would have known. The boy’d never had much of a sweet tooth, which, considering that he had inherited his father’s delicate health, was probably for the best. Still, what harm could it cause to let Marjorie believe? Francis smiled and forced herself not to focus on the dark hairs that formed a light mustache on the other woman’s upper lip. Marjorie turned and shuffled into the kitchen, the thick damp wad of her undergarments showing plainly beneath the graying white of her cotton skirt.
Perhaps it was cruel on her part to feed Marjorie’s delusions—her hinted at, but never fully voiced belief that shortly after his homecoming, Dylan would take her as his wife. That was a worry for tomorrow, not today.
For more than a year, it had only been companionship and empathy that kept Francis opening her door to Marjorie. Then around two months back, something extraordinary happened. At first Francis thought Marjorie had finally slid past confused and straight into full-on crazy, as she watched Marjorie’s face change before her very eyes, the muscles tensing and her regard taking on a sharpened clarity that usually lacked in this habitual sleepwalker’s eyes. Then Marjorie began speaking, her voice transformed, growing deeper, raspier. Francis stared in amazement as the spirit of an Indian guide spoke through the plump bottle blonde. Francis would never have believed it, had the next voice not been that of her own dear Clarence, who spoke of things only her husband could have remembered. Then, after proving himself to her, he shared what he, from the realm of spirit, could glean about their son’s well-being.