Songs in Ordinary Time

by Mary McGarry Morris

  The air seemed thinner here, the road more narrow, steep and rutted. In the distance a dog howled. There were crickets and frogs, and now the splash of an unseen waterfall on rocks. Ahead lay the pig farm, its windows dark, all but one up on the second floor. Carson’s two trucks were parked across the road in front of the barn. Here, the earth smelled of sweet warm rot. There was no dead body, but a vision, he assured himself, moving closer to the house. It was like Father Gannon said, our brains play tricks on us, and all at once now, he knew how to get Jozia back. Maybe if she thought there were ghosts around she’d be too afraid to live here. Maybe this was God’s test to see how brave and strong he was, to see how much love he had. He picked up a stick and crept close, keeping his head below the windowsills. He reached up and tapped three times on the front windows. Then he went along the side, tapping on all those windows. He was at the back of the house now, but it was too dark out here. He scurried next to a narrow shed, its furrowed tin roof sparkling with starlight. He squatted down and raked his fingers back and forth in the dirt until he had a handful of stones. He darted into the yard and threw the stones against the side of the house. He ducked down next to the shed again and felt around for more stones. A light came on downstairs. A dog barked loudly from inside the house. The back door squeaked open with a glare of light that flooded the yard. Howard crept to the back of the shed.

  “Who’s out there?” Grondine Carson demanded. “I said who’s out there?”

  Now Howard was trembling. This was real. The stories had ended. The dream was over. This would end with Jozia even madder at him. He sprang blindly into the woods, branches batting his face and twigs cracking underfoot as he ran.

  “Son of a bitch. You no-good son of a bitch.” Carson panted in pursuit, and then a bullet whizzed past his head in a streak of heat.

  He turned and scrambled up a brambly rise. Thorns gashed his neck and arms. He could hear a siren coming up the road. All that mattered now was that Jozia not find out. A dog growled nearby. The running footsteps were almost on top of him. He stumbled down the other side of the rise, his feet skidding along thick slippery pine needles.

  “Hold it!” Carson cried as he started to run again. Carson fired.

  And the night and all the stars and stories exploded, pinwheeling around him. As he fell the panting dog pounced on his chest, its thick paws pinning him there. His right leg was burning hot. He touched the sticky wet hole. The dog growled and snapped at his face.

  “Oh Jesus!” Carson groaned above the beam of light in his eyes. “Howard! Why didn’t you say it was you?”

  His eyes closed and he thought sure he was dead, and then men were hollering, and lights spilled down the rise.

  “It’s Howard,” Carson cried. “I shot him. Oh God, I shot Jozia’s brother.”

  “Howard! Howard!” Jozia screamed, and his eyes opened as his sister ran past the policemen in her white bathrobe. She pushed Carson aside and dropped to her knees. “Oh poor baby Howard,” she wept, cradling his head in her hands.

  Two men carried him from the woods and slid him into the back seat of the cruiser. They sped him to the hospital, where Dr. Deitler cut the bullet from his thigh. The doctor held it up between tweezers to show him, then dropped it into a metal cup. As it clinked, Howard fainted.

  It was the two remaining policemen who found the corpse, so decomposed they could not tell at first if it was a man or a woman. Man, they guessed looking down at the rank straw hat that had been underneath the body. The stained papers in the shredded pocket bore the name Earl Lapham Jones. Twenty years old, read Sonny Stoner. Probably been there all summer, Dr. Deitler guessed.

  Probably had been, Sonny agreed just inside the mortuary door. Day after day, through rain and wind and heat. So that was it. There it lay, sealed in canvas. The corruption. The vile manifestation of his failure. He turned away, disgusted and weak with the realization that it was finally over. This morning he’d found out that there had never been a life insurance policy on Carol, and he’d been relieved. There would be no comfort from his loss, no profit from his sins. Some of his men wanted to pin this murder on Haddad, who had been transferred from the hospital to jail, but Grondine Carson was the only suspect. It didn’t take any brilliant detective work to know what had happened to Earl Lapham Jones. The pigman had caught the young man trespassing on his property and had shot him. Carson continued to deny everything, even Sonny’s carefully worded suggestion that Jones had threatened him, and Carson, after all the intrusions on his property, had been forced to shoot in self-defense.

  “No sir,” Carson repeated. “That never did happen.”

  Like a visitor in his own front parlor, Carson sat red-eyed and rigidly erect on the austere loveseat. He kept turning his cap in his big stained hands. Jozia was back in town tending her brother, and the taciturn pigman was alone again.

  “Well, maybe it was the same thing as Howard, then,” Stoner offered, noting the ruffled curtains in the bright rainy windows, the newly blacked woodstove, the waxed floors. He thought of his own neglected house. “Maybe you just heard a sound one night and you ran out and you fired off a few shots thinking to scare whoever it was away. And you hit him, but you never even knew it, and he ran in the grove to hide, and that’s where he died. How about that?”

  Carson shook his head. “No sir.” He rubbed his eyes. “I told you, all those times, all the trouble I had here, I only once ever fired my gun and that was last night.” His weary gaze sought Stoner’s. “I thought they were trying to get in here. And Jozia was so scared again.”

  “Again? You mean it happened before?”

  “No. Like I already said. Howard was always telling her bad things, trying to scare her home. He told her there was a dead man in the woods.” Carson shook his head. “Only I didn’t pay no attention. Should have, but I didn’t.”

  Sonny got up to go. He had already questioned Howard, who thought it had been six weeks ago, anyway, when he stumbled on the moonlit body. The only incongruity was Howard’s insistence there had been a knife in the chest. But then again, even Jozia had said of her brother, “Half what he thinks he sees is all mixed up because he always puts the wrong parts of things in all the wrong places.”

  Howard Menka had definitely seen a body and was obviously confused about having seen a knife. Grondine Carson had shot and killed an intruder on his property. The only real mystery now was Earl Lapham Jones himself, a man no one knew and no one missed.

  Sonny turned on the wipers and headed back to town. He would give Carson as much time as he could.

  Norm honked the horn in front of Weeb’s house. His eyes scanned all the windows, hoping for a glimpse of Janice. He wanted her to see him driving a Cadillac. This was the second night in a row Omar had let him drive it. Last night he had taken Benjy to the drive-in to see A Summer Place. It had rained and Benjy fell asleep and then the windows fogged up, so he had gone home early. “What’s that?” Benjy had asked the minute they stepped inside. It had seemed in the dark with the creaking and banging that the whole house was shaking. It had been his mother’s headboard hitting the wall as Omar moaned.

  “Pipes,” he had whispered, pulling Benjy toward the door. They had driven up to Seward’s for ice cream.

  He watched Weeb come down the walk to the car. “I’m impressed,” Weeb said, leaning in the window. “What’d you do, finally catch him with the douche bag?” Weeb climbed in and turned the radio up as they drove off. “I saw her the other night,” he yelled, drumming his fingers on the dashboard.

  “Who?” Norm demanded, turning the radio down.

  “Bernadette Mansaw,” Weeb said. “I picked my father up down the bowling alley and she was there.”

  “Yah. So?”

  “You know what she had on the counter? That soap, the same stuff as your mother. She was selling it.”

  “Oh yah? I guess a lot of people are doing that now.” He nodded. “Going into business. Selling soap. That Presto Soap’s pretty good stuff,
I hear. It’ll clean just about anything.” He felt like stopping the car and shoving Weeb into the gutter for making him sound like such an idiot.

  “I should tell my sister.” Weeb shook his head. “She’s always puking all over the place. Morning sickness, my mother calls it. Morning, noon, and night sickness,” Weeb said with a shudder.

  They drove around, but the streets were empty. There were only a few cars at the A+X. It was still summer, but there was a depressing chill in the night air. Hoping to see Janice, Norm kept suggesting they go back to the house, but Weeb didn’t want to. He was sick of being in every night. But after a while his legs began to ache, and he said he’d better go home and put ice on them.

  After Weeb filled the ice bags, they went downstairs to watch television in the rec room. Norm asked about all the boxes stacked in the corner. Weeb told him they contained Janice’s belongings that were going to her future in-laws’ house in Rhode Island, where she and her new husband would be living after they were married. He kept glancing at the boxes. So it was true. It was really happening. He asked if that meant Janice would be dropping out of school. Weeb shook his head. Russ wouldn’t be going back to school, either, he said. He would be working for his uncle’s construction company while he took night classes. Weeb said Russ’s parents were barely speaking to Janice, they were so mad.

  Norm and Weeb sat on the musty divan watching Dragnet. He could tell his questions were annoying Weeb, so he tried to pace them. They stared at the screen as Joe Friday jumped from his police car and ran into the lobby of an apartment building.

  “So what are they mad about?” Norm asked when the commercial came on.

  Weeb gave him a weird look. “Who?”

  “That guy. Russ, his parents.”

  “I don’t know. Everything. They’re just mad.” He looked at Norm. “What do you care?”

  “I don’t know. I just…I guess it’s just interesting, that’s all.”

  “Yah, well,” Weeb began, then seemed to change his mind abruptly. “Well, maybe to you it’s interesting, but I’m not used to all this commotion, all this trouble!”

  Norm’s cheeks stung. “What I meant was, well, you’re going to be an uncle, for instance. Now, that’s interesting.” He knew exactly what Weeb had wanted to say. Every time there had been some new mess in Norm’s life, Weeb had never once said anything, not even when Alice got caught with Father Gannon.

  “Yah, that’s right.” Weeb grinned. “I am. I’m going to be an uncle, huh?”

  Norm felt something in his chest jerk out of place. What if this Russ’s family hated the kid? What if Russ hated this kid that might not even be his? He told Weeb he’d be right back, he had to go to the bathroom.

  Janice was in the kitchen. With one foot propped on a chair she was painting her toenails a bright pink. A cigarette burned in a cut-glass ashtray. Her wet blond hair was done up on enormous black mesh rollers that bobbed as she bent forward. Glancing up at him, she continued to stroke polish on the nail of her big toe. Cotton balls were wedged between each perfect toe. His heart ached. He had loved her for as long as he could remember.

  “What do you want?”

  “Oh, nothing. I just came upstairs.” He gestured feebly at the basement door. “Dragnet’s on.” He put his hands on his hips and exhaled through his mouth the way Omar would right before a sales pitch. “I don’t know. It’s kind of juvenile, if you ask me.”

  She took a puff of her cigarette, then blew the smoke straight up into the light over the table. “I didn’t,” she said.

  “Didn’t what?” he asked, smiling, then caught himself. “Oh well, no, I know, but I just thought I’d…come up and say…say…” His face burned and sweat rolled down his back. He couldn’t get it out. She stared at him as he continued to stammer. “The thing is, you see…well, first off, I want you to know I never…Oh God,” he moaned and shook his head.

  “Norm, don’t worry about it.”

  “But whatever happened…I mean, if it did, that is, I just want you to know I’m…”

  “Forget about it,” she said with a shrug. “No big deal. Really.”

  “But it is!” he said, pulling out a chair and sitting next to her. “For me it is. I’m not like that.”

  She couldn’t look at him. “I know. And that’s why I felt so guilty.”

  “Well, don’t!” he pleaded. “Don’t feel guilty! I don’t.”

  “Well, I do. I mean, I was the one that started the whole thing.”

  “You did?” He could feel himself getting excited. If only he could remember it. “But I wanted to, too. I know I did!” He didn’t want her feeling like a tramp when they were both responsible.

  “Yah, because you were trying to impress everyone. They were all laughing and clapping.”

  “They were?” He was shocked. “You mean people were watching?” It had been an orgy. No wonder he’d blanked it out.

  She gave him a funny look. “Well, yah, what do you think? They were even taking bets on how long you’d last.”

  His mouth hung open. He didn’t know what to say or where to look as she continued speaking in a low voice. “I tried to get you to stop, but you wouldn’t, and things were just out of control, and I didn’t know what to do. Norm, promise me you’ll never again let anyone talk you into another chug-a-lug.”

  A chug-a-lug. Oh Jesus, she’d been talking about a beer-drinking match, not sex.

  She leaned toward him in a dizzying rush of smoke and scented soap. “I mean, God, Norm, you were so sick it was…it was pitiful. I mean everyone was blasted, but you…you barfed, and then you started to cry and say things, and then you passed out. God, you were laying in it. Your whole face was in it. We didn’t know what to do. And this woman was there. She said she knew you, so we let her get you home.”

  His eyes widened with the humiliating image of himself with his hands over his face as she begged him to stop crying. “Well,” he said. “I’m glad we finally…” He cleared his throat. He couldn’t look at her. “You know, got this out in the open, then. Because that’s what I wanted. I wanted to tell you I was sorry.”

  “That’s what you kept saying then, how sorry you were.”

  “Well yah, for embarrassing you in front of your friends,” he said, hoping to sound at least a little lighthearted.

  “Don’t worry about it. Besides, they all felt really bad for you.”

  Felt bad for him! Jesus Christ!

  “You kept saying all these things about your father.” She glanced away, adding softly. “I almost cried myself.”

  He turned to go. The bitch, he hoped he never saw her again. He was through with Weeb, through with this whole frigging town.

  “Norm!” she called, following him to the door. “I probably shouldn’t say this, but if I don’t and then something happens, like, you know, years from now…you know, like, well, like your father…I mean, in a way you’re like my little brother.” She reached up and put her hand on his shoulder. “Just be real careful, will you?” She stood on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek.

  He drove home, turning into the driveway so fast that the tires squealed. His mother and Omar were in the kitchen. “That boy’s gotta go bad,” Omar laughed as he stormed past them. He ran upstairs and slammed his door. A few minutes later there was a knock on the door. “What do you want?” he bellowed.

  “I want to talk to you,” his mother called back.

  “Well, I don’t feel like talking, all right?”

  “Open the door, Norm.”

  “No, just leave me alone. Everyone just leave me the hell alone!”

  The door opened and she stepped inside. “Omar was just telling me you’re the best salesman he’s ever seen. And I told him how proud I am of you, and he said I should be telling you that. And he’s right.” She came closer and scratched the back of his head. “I’m very proud of you, Norm,” she whispered. “Very, very proud.”

  Today they had made so many sales that by midafternoon they were out o
f soap. Norm and Omar were a well-drilled team now, their every word and gesture significant, including his nervous stammer as he introduced Omar as his boss to each housewife. “I haven’t been doing too well,” he would confide, clearing his throat while the woman glanced uneasily at the tall man in the rumpled suit. Omar would merely nod, his sharp-eyed stare furrowing to disapproval the moment Norm patted his pockets, then began fumbling through sales folders for the missing product brochures. Shaking his head, Omar would watch him race back to the car. “It’s a shame,” Omar would confide to the concerned woman. “He’s such an earnest young man. I was hoping to give him this one last chance to prove himself.” And then he’d smile. “It’s kind of you to be so patient.”

  “Oh I don’t mind,” they’d usually say, often adding that they thought the boy was doing a good job. He was just a little nervous, they’d tell Omar.

  When Norm returned they would listen intently to the rest of his pitch, to show Omar what a good salesman the boy could be. They always ordered something, even if it was just one bottle of dish detergent. And Omar always urged them to pay by check. “Here,” he’d insist, holding out his pen. “Use mine. No sense in wasting your own ink.”

  It was one of those personal touches customers like. Norm was grateful to be learning so much about business and life at the hands of a master. “Service in even the smallest details. That’s what makes for success,” Omar said, launching into yet another homily delivered in his hypnotic rhetoric as the big warm car cruised over the country roads. “People helping people, that’s the bottom line. You see, I love people, Norm. I really do. I’m not ashamed to say it, and I’m not afraid to show it. No sir, never have been and never will be, because that’s what being on this planet’s all about.”

  He woke up every morning looking forward to another day on the road with Omar. They had already sold half his mother’s stock, earning enough to get her car back from Hillman’s garage and to make one of the delinquent loan payments. His mother treated him with a new respect, as if he were a peer. At this rate, she said, they would be able to start a savings account in a month or two. She looked younger. Her eyes glowed. Sometimes he would look up and find her smiling at him. Yesterday on their way home, after their sandwich and beer, Omar had taken him into a fancy dress shop on the outskirts of town. Omar kept holding dresses up and asking him how he thought they’d look on his mother. At first he’d been embarrassed. But the saleswoman was so charmed by the idea of the son helping his father pick out a dress for his mother that she began to model the ones they liked. They finally decided on a red dress with a black stand-up collar.