The Lost Saints of Tennessee

by Amy Franklin-Willis

  “You did this, Ezekiel Cooper! My baby girl’s going to die because of you!”

  The doctor cleared his throat. “Ma’am, your daughter won’t die. And her chances of a future healthy pregnancy are good, given her age and general good health.”

  Nurse Charlotte came up behind him. She said Jackie was asking to see me. I looked over at Mrs. Chatham. It didn’t seem right that I should see Jackie before her. But she waved me away. Said she needed to phone Mr. Chatham. The nurse led me back down the hallway to Jackie.

  Nurse Charlotte stopped before a closed curtain and turned to me. “Your girl looks pretty bad right now. You going to be able to handle that?”

  How bad was bad? Would there be blood pouring out of her, spilling onto the floor? My mind kept spinning round and round.

  Jackie looked dead. Her eyes were closed and her face blanched so white it was hard to tell where she ended and the bedsheets began. I couldn’t keep a “Jesus” from escaping my mouth.

  Nurse Charlotte glowered. “Go over and say something. Hold her hand. Go on.” She nudged me in the back.

  I searched for Jackie’s hand beneath the sheet. It felt so cold and small in my own. I brushed the hair back from her forehead and leaned down to kiss her. When she opened her eyes, I could see all of the light had gone out of them.

  She began to speak and I had to bend down to hear.

  “This solves everything, doesn’t it?”

  “Shh. I love you.”

  She closed her eyes again. Delicate blue veins stretched across the eyelids and I traced them ever so lightly until her face creased with pain.

  “What it is?”

  Nurse Charlotte drew me back from the bed. “She probably needs more pain medicine. You run along now.”

  The miscarriage did, in a way, solve things. I could go to Virginia as planned. All alone, as Mother liked to remind me. “Don’t be trying to sneak that girl onto the train. This is a blessing, Zeke. A blessing.”

  My father had been kinder, telling me he was sorry for both Jackie and me. Within a few days, Jackie was out of the hospital. She spent another week at home resting. I tried to come see her every day but her mother said she didn’t want visitors.

  On Jackie’s first day back at school, I gave her a clutch of corn poppies to cheer her up. She said thank you, all politelike. There was talk running around school about why Jackie went to the hospital. But since none of us—not me, not Kate, and not Tommy—would say anything about it, nobody could say for sure Jackie had been pregnant. They also couldn’t say for sure she hadn’t been.

  Jackie and I met for lunch, the first time we’d been alone since it happened. I asked if she wanted to go to Grayson’s Café and she shook her head, said there would be too many people. She wasn’t hungry, so we ended up walking around the campus.

  “I’m so sorry this happened,” I said. “I feel responsible.”

  She held my hand as we walked but didn’t lace her fingers through mine like normal. Instead, she grasped just a few of my fingers, the hold less sure.

  “You look so sad, Jackie. I can’t take it.”

  She stopped walking, let go of my hand. “You know what the worst part is? I feel like I did this. I didn’t know if I wanted this baby, Zeke. I prayed that it would just go away and everything could be like it was.”

  Jackie hid her face from me and I watched her shoulders shake as she cried. I tried to put my arms around her but she pushed me away.

  “God doesn’t work that way, sweet girl. It wasn’t your fault. The baby just wasn’t strong enough to be born. I talked with Preacher Dawson last Sunday and he told me God has a special place in heaven for all of the lost unborn babies. A real special place.”

  I put my arm around her waist, trying to bring her close.

  “Please. Don’t touch me.” She walked ahead, putting distance between us. “Don’t you understand?”

  I followed her to the athletic fields. The noon sun beat down on the running track. I fished out my Cleveland cap from my jeans and pulled the brim low over my eyes.

  “It’s getting hot early, don’t you think?” A stupid thing to say.

  “I don’t feel the heat,” she said. “I don’t feel anything.”

  I stood there with my hands in my pockets and watched Jackie walk away. I wanted to go after her, to tell her I loved her, but my feet stayed planted where they were. Her sadness scared me. I didn’t know how to be that sad. Didn’t want to know. It would be another fifteen years before Carter’s death left me with more grief than I could carry.

  May rolled around and everybody in the senior class was making plans for prom and graduation. Tommy kept bugging me to ask Jackie to the prom. I told him to shut up. In the second week of May I caught Jackie outside of homeroom.

  “We need to talk. About graduation. About prom.”

  She clasped her books to her chest and rested her chin on top of them. Her eyes were soft as she looked at me.

  “We’ll go to the prom together,” she said. “The other stuff we’ll talk about later, okay?”

  “I got a letter from UVA. Full scholarship.”

  The bell rang and I couldn’t tell if she’d heard me or not. Before I could ask she disappeared into class. The teacher shut the door in my face, leaving me to stare at its chipped white paint.

  The night of the prom Jackie told me she’d decided not to go to college. Not even Freed-Hardeman in McNairy County. Said she wasn’t ready to be away from home. I begged her to think about coming to Virginia.

  “If you live here and I go to school in Virginia, we’ll never see each other. Why don’t we just get married and then you could live with me there?”

  “Is that a proposal?”

  She looked so beautiful that night, dressed in a blue satin dress the color of her eyes and her hair swept up, leaving the nape of her neck exposed. I’d been longing to kiss that spot since I picked her up.

  “You bet that was a proposal.”

  She threw back her head and laughed. The happy sound went straight to my heart. The world felt like it might be tipping right side up again.

  “That was not a proposal,” she said.

  Jackie drew me out to the dance floor as the band played “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” I held her close and tried to breathe in the scent of her, to bury it in my memory so that months from now, I’d be able to close my eyes and conjure the sweetness of the White Shoulders perfume and the warmth of her skin, which always smelled as if she’d just come in from the sun. Her head rested against my shoulder and my palm pressed into the curve of her back. The months of being apart fell away. The dance seemed to last forever and when the music stopped, Jackie kept swaying.

  “Don’t stop,” she whispered. “Everything will be different when we stop. Just keep moving.”

  Seventeen

  1985

  The noise is a roaring, howling scream punctuated by claps of thunder. Nothing can survive this.

  Tucker claws his way into my lap, panting so fast a heart attack may take him before the storm. His panicked scratches on my arms dot the floor with small, dark circles of blood. A buzzing noise comes from the radio cradled in Elle’s lap. Her face is thrown into the closet’s shadows by the flashlight beam, revealing nothing of how she is feeling. The words hang on, hang on, hang on whirl through my head. I whisper them into Tucker’s ear. Hang on, boy, hang on. The warmth of another hand closes around mine. Elle and I are now both holding on to the dog.

  A vibrating throb pulses through the house. Elle grips my hand tighter. I lie like a son of a bitch and tell her we’re going to be fine.

  “Yep. No problem,” she says, yelling the words above the chaos.

  One minute passes. Then another. The rattling will not stop.

  Jackie was not a grace-under-pressure kind
of person. When the girls were little, I would get semihysterical calls at work from her. Louisa stuck an M&M up her nose and I can’t get it out; get home NOW. Honora fell off the porch and her arm hurts and is bleeding and it might be broken, for Christ’s sake. Did I tell you she’s BLEEDING?

  “Go out with me.”

  Tucker stops panting for a second.

  “What?” Elle yells.

  The wind lessens. “When this is over, let’s go on a date like regular people do.”

  Elle aims the flashlight at me, its brightness forcing me to shield my eyes. “Are you crazy?”

  Tucker licks her hand. Traitor. Before I can figure out what to say, the dog eases himself up. Elle and I lean on the closet door, listening. The steady fall of rain drums on the roof. Thunder echoes again but from a distance now. The tornado is gone.

  We make a quick tour of the house and the only damage we find is a few blown-out windows on the back side. The glass crunches beneath our boots like egg shells cracking. I try to call Georgia and Osborne but the phone lines are down. When I suggest that Elle should spend the night at Lacey Farms, she says she has horses to mind.

  “Let me help you, then.”

  “I can handle it.”

  “But you don’t know what it’s going to be like over there. It could be a lot worse.”

  The raincoat is zipped, the hood pulled back over the short dark hair. The movements are efficient, swift. I do not want to let her go. Neither does the dog. She gives him a pat.

  “Look,” she says. It’s not clear if she’s talking to the dog or to me. “I won’t go out with you but I’ll give you riding lessons. Assuming we both still have horses to ride. I’ve got to go.”

  Before I can respond, she slams the door shut behind her. I collapse on the bench in the front hallway, my pulse still crazy from adrenaline. The rain pings against the windows now as if it is only a normal thunderstorm. The flashlight guides me into the kitchen to a lone Budweiser in the fridge. Elle’s applesauce sits next to a tub of margarine. Still standing, I make my way through a whole jar of the sweet fruit, giving Tucker the last spoonful. There is little left to do except drink the beer and fall asleep on the sofa. Tucker throws himself on the floor in front of me, unwilling to let me out of his sight.

  The power comes back on at five o’clock in the morning, flooding the living room with stark light. The wind and rain have stopped. In the predawn, the front window reveals shadows of the mess left behind. Branches cover the driveway. One oak tree is upended, the tentacles of its roots exposed. The morning’s silence is uneasy; not one bird is singing. The front porch light guides the dog and me around the branches as we walk down the front steps. Pale gray roof shingles lie on the ground in groups of twos and threes. The phone jangles from inside the house. At least we’ve got electricity and BellSouth.

  “Didn’t wake you, did I?” Elle sounds hoarse, as if she hasn’t made it to sleep yet.

  “I’m awake.”

  “I can see the Laceys’ driveway from my top floor and it looks a mess. The dog and you doing okay?”

  “How’s your place?”

  “Storm went right around me. The horses nearly broke out of their stalls but settled down after I forced tranquilizers down their throats.”

  This conjures an image of a horse rearing up over Elle, powerful hooves inches from her head. “You could’ve been hurt. You should have let me help you.”

  No response.

  “You should check on the horses over there,” she says. “Heard from Georgia and Osborne?”

  “Not yet. Wait a minute.”

  A white Cadillac drives slowly up to the house, making wide loops to avoid branches along the way.

  “Listen, they’re coming home right now. I should go.”

  There is a pause and both of us seem uncertain how to end the conversation. Tucker lets out a bark announcing the car’s imminent arrival.

  “Call me when you’re ready for a riding lesson,” she says before hanging up.

  My hand lingers over the phone. I’m itching to call back and tell her to keep talking; it doesn’t matter what she says. I like the feel of her voice next to my ear.

  The last time a woman besides Jackie seemed worth the trouble was right after the divorce. Leona Price worked at the plant as a secretary. I walked by her desk every day on the way to the floor. Soon as word got around about Jackie and me splitting up, Leona took it upon herself to say hello. It didn’t take long to notice how the top two buttons of her blouse always seemed to be undone. The divorce might have sent me crawling into a hole, but I wasn’t dead.

  Leona and I lasted two months. The sex was good; she had a beautiful body and always seemed in the mood. But I got tired of having to tell her how pretty she looked and listen to her go on about how she hated her job, her house, her mother. Jackie found out about the two of us, which wasn’t hard to do in a town the size of Clayton. It was probably one of my sisters who told her, Daisy most likely. When Leona and I had been seeing each other for a few weeks, I ran into Jackie and the girls at the Mabry Piggly Wiggly. Honora and Lou hugged me until Jackie told them to go pick out something for dinner. The custody agreement called for them to spend every other weekend with me but the shed was cramped, so it ended up being more like once a month.

  Jackie leaned over to me and said, “And how is Leona the Loose?”

  She was jealous and had no right to be. So I said I was glad, after all these years, to be with a woman who didn’t need to be talked into fooling around. It wasn’t true. Not all the way true at least. But enough true to hit home, making Jackie turn and storm off.

  “Thank God you’re all right, Ezekiel!” Cousin Georgia hugs the breath out of me before turning to the house. “Look at it! I told you, Oz, it would stand up to that storm. And it did! Just a few roof shingles!”

  Osborne climbs out of the car with neither relief nor happiness on his face. He plants his feet wide and puts his hands on his hips, looking out toward the lake.

  “Tornado didn’t touch down here. Or we would’ve lost everything. What do you say, Zeke? Did it pass over the house?”

  The Cummins’s place, where they spent the night, lay three miles to the west and only suffered high winds and rain. The three of us make our way around the house, surveying the property as we go. Tucker trails behind, sniffing at every branch. When we reach the north side of the house, Osborne stops short. Georgia gasps and grabs his hand, hides her face in his shoulder. Where yesterday stood neat rows of apple trees, today stands nothing. The orchard is gone. Not a single tree remains, only an empty dirt plot.

  The path of the tornado becomes clear in the morning light. It touched down at the western edge of the orchard, churning up everything between it and the lake. The loblolly pines I had admired only the day before are broken in half like matchsticks. I close my eyes at the sight, wishing I had been able to prepare them to view this.

  A black and white barn cat speeds across the dirt. Tucker makes a halfhearted lunge for it. The sun breaks over the Blue Ridge, spilling amber light through the fog and illuminating the strange emptiness of the orchard. The wind carries the sound of a car starting somewhere. Surrounding farm owners must be making the same inventory as the Laceys, waking to worlds altered.

  Osborne lets go of Georgia’s hand. He turns and walks back to the house, shoulders hunched and head down. Standing next to me, Georgia shakes her head.

  “Lord have mercy,” she says softly.

  PART II

  LILLIAN

  1985

  Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered . . . When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long . . . Thou art my hiding place; thou shalt preserve me from trouble; thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance.

  Psalm 32:1-3

  E
ighteen

  I am not dead. Yet. My body is wearing out, too tired to bother much anymore. Violet drove me to Tolliver yesterday to hear the results of the chest X-ray. Dr. Trent said there’s a spot on one of my lungs. Isn’t it amazing when you think about it—that a machine can see right through your skin, through your blood, and see what’s wrong inside?

  I’m not going to stop smoking. What for? So I can live a bit longer? No, thank you.

  The twenty-seven-mile trip back to Clayton felt like it took hours. The green branches of pine tree after pine tree blurred past. I was jealous of their tallness, their view down on all of us humans, shuffling around at ground level, never sure of where we’re going or why we’re going there. Violet sniffled away in the driver’s seat, crying enough tears for both of us.

  “We’ll fight this, Momma,” she said. “You’re too young for us to lose you.”

  I told her to wipe her eyes and concentrate on not getting us killed on the way home.

  This town is about as near dead as I feel. Nobody but old people lives in Clayton anymore. And there’s not many of us left. Carter Sr.’s been gone almost five years now. Heart attack at sixty-three. My Violet still lives in Clayton but only because she and Louis can’t afford anything else. It all started with the school. In 1968 they closed it and bused the kids over to Mabry. Now what family is going to move to a town without a school? Way before that the lumber mill shut down. Then the number 35 and 36 trains stopped running every day. The Main Street Hotel went out of business in 1960, and on and on until what’s left is a bunch of empty, falling-down buildings and town folk who are dying more than they’re living.

  The phone rang off and on the whole night. I didn’t pick up. Nothing to say, really. Daisy probably called first. Then Violet. I imagine my oldest daughter spent most of the evening watching my house out her kitchen window, trying to make sure I didn’t stick my head in the oven. Not that I would. But it’s good to know what your options are.