Family Linen

by Lee Smith

  * * *

  But she’s not far. Fay in fact is finally ready for that trip. Except she thinks they might try to stop her, Nettie and Clinus, if they find out, so she’s hiding, sort of, or as much as she can, she’s so big, stretched out in the back seat of Clinus’s car, ha ha! It’s all over now, it’s time to shake the dust off your feet honey and hit the road. But Lord it’s hot you can’t breathe in a closed-up car honey a Pekingese would die on the spot who is also a dog, the one in the schoolbook, but Bert had better shut up barking like that, he’s a bad, bad dog. Shut up, Bert. It’s so bright out here but we’ll buy you some sunglasses honey, you’ll need them in all that sand. The beach itself is a mile wide in places, imagine that. Imagine the beach it will take us three days to get there nobody else will go except you and me honey this is our secret honey oh honey we’ll go in the car. We will go in the car, Lacy who looks like Princess Di says won’t you come in the car Fay to see them, all those flowers on the hillside, and all that blue. Princess Di honey I’ve been there. I’ve been there too, and laid among them, and looked straight up over his back at the old blue sky. The wacky way I met my mate was he took me for little spin or a little walk or perhaps it was in a bowling alley, I forget, I forget. Luke and Laura spent an unforgettable night in Wyndham’s Department Store. All my children live in Pine Valley including Greg and Jenny the starcrossed lovers destined to spend their lives apart, you have to walk it for yourself. Opal has never loved anybody else but Sam the electrician and never will, she’s leaving for NBC now, bye bye. You have to have that spark and then you have to fan the flames. We will all see greener pastures in the sweet bye and bye, which Elizabeth wouldn’t let him sing at home, but he could have gone places with so much talent. You never know. Why Alan Ladd was a potato digger before he made it big, Clark Gable was a necktie salesman. I’ll sing and you can swim in the water and get some sun. Natalie Wood sank like a stone in her big heavy jacket, death by drowning said Dr. Thomas Noguchi about his investigation as detailed in his new book Coroner. Had Christopher Walken and Robert Wagner quarreled, aboard their yacht? Imagine the weight of the water, imagine the manner of death. He meant to go without me, I saw him trying to leave. He tried to sneak out in the storm in the night with Elizabeth sound asleep. He thought we were all asleep. He meant to take that journey by himself, he meant to leave me, and after all he’d said. Some men are just so mean. He said honey oh honey oh honey you’ll like it there. But then he meant to leave me in the end. The investigation will continue as detailed by Dr. Don Dotson. Nettie says they will dig up Elizabeth’s yard they will put in a pool, everybody who’s anybody in L.A. has a pool, you know. Ha ha! I see what he’s up to, I read the stars. The investigation will continue as detailed by Dr. Don Dotson and they will find the body in the water death by drowning, and all the dogs will bark. You have to take that lonesome journey by yourself. It’s a long hot trip honey but at least we’ll get to see the ocean.

  * * *

  “We can’t find her.” It’s Nettie, like a little black crow at Miss Elizabeth’s kitchen door.

  “Find who?” Lacy almost shouts in order to be heard over the sudden roar of the bulldozer, but then Nettie comes on in, followed by Kate, and shuts the door behind her.

  “Fay.” Nettie sits down at the kitchen table and starts fanning herself with a newspaper. “She’s not over here, is she?” Nettie looks around at all of them. Kate and Theresa look around too, eyes big, holding their tongues.

  “Why, you know she hasn’t gone anywhere for years and years,” says Candy.

  “Well, sometimes she’ll take a little walk or something, and that’s just what she done this time, I reckon, but me and Clinus can’t find her no way.”

  “I didn’t know she ever took a walk,” Sybill says, and Nettie snaps, “Well, I guess you don’t know everything.”

  “Did you all look in the closet?” Arthur asks.

  This question makes Kate and Theresa, hovering, like butterflies at the edge of the crisis, start giggling. “You all hush,” Myrtle says, rifling frantically through the kitchen drawers for a match, since her butane lighter seems to have disappeared.

  “Well, we might as well start in on the kitchen stuff, since we’re all in here,” Sybill says, climbing up on a chair so she can reach the blue china clock.

  “How long’s she been gone?” Arthur asks Nettie.

  “Don’t know. That’s the thing of it. Last I seen of her was last night, actually, she was watching the Tonight show. But the TV was on this morning too, Good Morning America. So it could of been real late last night, or it could of been this morning. I’ll be damned if I know,” Nettie says. Nettie’s face is hard and brown as wood, in fact that’s what she looks like, a little carved statue, folk art, thrown in among real people. She’s different from them. And now she sits and looks beyond them, drumming her fingers softly on the tabletop. Her eyes narrow as she sucks in smoke—what in the world does she see? Nettie looks like one of those smoking monkeys you buy at souvenir stands in Georgia.

  “I’ll try Clinus again,” Candy says, and dials, and lets it ring.

  Sybill turns the blue china clock over and over in her hands, and then runs her finger around the smiling sun in its center, and something comes up in her throat, and she starts to cry.

  “Nettie, can I have a match?” Myrtle asks, and Nettie gives her one, and then Myrtle can light her cigarette too and look at the scrap of paper in her hand, an old list of her mother’s she found in the drawer.

  “Well, you know she couldn’t have gone far.” Arthur is laughing.

  Nettie stands up and moves to the kitchen window.

  It’s a grocery list Myrtle has found. It reads: milk, oranges, eggs, bacon, bread, paper napkins, candles, prescription (Rexall), Metamucil, Ivory soap, all in Miss Elizabeth’s elegant, spidery hand. Myrtle is profoundly moved. It could be her list—why, she’s made this list a hundred times! Myrtle sees her mother clearly, sitting at the little kitchen desk to write this list, writing with her fountain pen and her head inclined to the side, and then Myrtle sees herself, making her own list, with a Pentel. Making a list every day, hundreds of lists, hundreds of days. Myrtle feels like she’s making some kind of a breakthrough, but she can’t tell what it is. She has got, as she will tell Don later, mixed emotions.

  Candy pats Sybill, who holds the clock and cries for her mother.

  “Jesus!” Kate says.

  “This is all so ironic,” says Theresa.

  “Did you call Ed Dark?” asks Arthur. Ed Dark is a state trooper they all went to high school with. “Clinus said she’d been talking about a trip,” Arthur says. “You don’t reckon she could of gotten down here to the bus station somehow, and gone off on a bus someplace?”

  “Arthur, don’t be silly,” Candy says. “Besides, wherever would she go?”

  “Well, she gets these crazy ideas,” Arthur says, “like all those prayer handkerchiefs that come in the mail from California. You can’t tell what she’s got in her mind. One time she sent off to buy a square foot of swamp in the Okefenokee, she showed me the deed.”

  “Sometimes Clinus knows things,” says Candy, “but he won’t say,” and Arthur, looking at her, wonders if Candy knows she’s a love child and guesses not. He’s not going to tell her, that’s for sure.

  “Clinus don’t know a thing about this,” Nettie says. “Clinus is worried to death.”

  Then Sybill says suddenly, “Nobody ever loved me,” and Candy hugs her, and says that’s silly, and Myrtle says it’s silly too. Myrtle hugs Sybill too.

  But Nettie stares beyond them out the window, where Dr. Don and Sean stand together watching the bulldozer dig the pool. All that earth looks startlingly red and raw, against the green. Nettie bites her lip. It don’t seem like none of the rest of them is even noticing.

  Except for Sean.

  He’s right there beside his daddy when the bulldoze
r hits the body or what’s left of it, where the old well used to be, he’s right there when the big bulldozer operator gets down off the yellow bulldozer and waves frantically at Dr. Don to come over there. Sean has been trying to show his father the gun, and see if he’ll let him keep it. “Not now, son,” Dr. Don keeps saying, or trying to say, above the roar of the bulldozer, all of which pisses Sean off, the way his father calls him “son” instead of his own name which is bad enough, and the fact that his father won’t pay any attention to what he says, which is just typical. Then when the fat guy climbs down off the dozer and leaves it running and waves his arms, Dr. Don takes off at a dead run to see what the old guy wants, like it’s something important, more important than his own son.

  Idly, so idly that in memory it will always seem like a dream, Sean raises his great-grandfather’s silver revolver and points it straight out in front of him. He isn’t thinking of anything at all, his mind as clean as a whistle. His father bobs up and down, running across the field, while Sean holds the point of the revolver steady. Dad used to be a jock, he still thinks he’s real hot shit. His dad’s back goes up and down, up and down as he runs across the dry red clumps of dirt. He’s still in real good shape. Sean holds his arm out steadily for a long time, until his arm hurts, and then he pulls the trigger. Bam! It’s a huge explosion, a huge satisfying puff of white smoke exactly like you see on TV, and the noise is so loud it seems to ricochet back and forth inside Sean’s head like the 4th of July. Well, that’s that. Sean will remember thinking this, and finding himself flat on the ground with no memory of falling. Smoke hangs all around him. It hurts his nose. He waits for it to clear, to see what has happened.

  The first thing he sees is his father, Dr. Don, now running as fast as he can in the other direction, back toward him, Sean, and screaming, “Son, are you all right?” Sean says yes, but no sound comes, and then he notices his right hand, which is bleeding. Dr. Don reaches him and kneels and hugs him, hard. “Never fool around with an old gun like that, son,” he says. But Sean doesn’t even care. He’s crying, and so is his dad. Whatever else Sean will have to do in this life, he won’t have to kill his father, having done it. He can relax some now, and grow another fourteen inches, and take up tennis and girls. His head is pressed into his father’s stiff white shirt. Out the corner of one eye he sees the kitchen door and then the cold-pantry door burst open like doors in one of those fancy little Swiss clocks where the people come pouring out right at noon, and Nettie swoops like a bird across the red earth toward him, followed by his mother, screaming, and Candy and Lacy and Kate . . .

  “Jesus H. Christ!” This is just about the worst day that Coy Eubanks, the bulldozer operator, has ever spent. It’s damn sure the damn worst job. First you run up on a half-rotted corpse and then some goddamn fool teenager shoots himself in the hand. They’ll do anything for attention. Coy Eubanks would of walked off the job right then, right that minute, if he hadn’t owed a favor to Dr. Don, who cured him last year of venereal warts and helped him cover it up from the missus. Well, everybody’s got something to hide. But most people don’t have no actual bodies where they’re planning to put their pool. Still, if a body is under there, you need to get it up. Coy can see that. And he halfway wonders if Dr. Don wasn’t looking for this body after all, the way he seemed so excited, sketching out for Coy where to dig. Well, you can’t ever tell, and in the long run, it don’t matter. It’s a sight how many people through the ages must have fell down in a well. If it was Coy, though, deciding, he’d of put the pool up a little closer to the house and built in a barbecue pit. He’d never spend this much money and not have a barbecue pit. Well. Ain’t going to be no more work done this day, for damn sure.

  Sean stands unsteadily and walks, supported by Myrtle and Kate, toward the house, while the rest of them go over to look down in Coy’s big hole. What they see is bones and bits of bones and clothes, chewed up by the bulldozer, and one good shoe, all of it bearing little or no relation to what was, but everybody knows that’s him all right—Jewell Rife. Sybill is sobbing. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m just so sorry,” is what she says. She still carries the blue clock, trailing its cord along through the dirt. Lacy suddenly grabs at Nettie’s shoulder, hard, and makes her turn around. “Nettie,” Lacy says, “what do you think?”

  What do I think? Lord. You’re asking me? Me that has left one man and buried two? Well, a lot has happened. And sometimes, looking back, I can remember how it went, but I can’t recall what it was like, all those years ago. I can see me sitting in that kitchen out in Long Valley, grieving, I can see the high spots of color in Elizabeth’s cheeks when she married Jewell. But I can’t recall how strong I felt things, how wrought up I got then. Seems like it was somebody else. Life goes by so fast, just like a dream. But I’ll tell you about Elizabeth if you want to know.

  Elizabeth, and I hate to say it, was a pure-tee fool. Now I don’t mean a fool in the sense of dumb. But learning and knowing are two different things. Elizabeth learned aplenty, but she never knew much. Me, I’ve known more than I wanted to, all my life. And I was here. I saw it all. I saw it coming, and I saw it pass. I know what happened in this house, I’ve always known what happened here, but I know when to hold my tongue. There’s no point hanging dirty linen on the line. You can know it, but you don’t have to tell it. Because life is long, and bad times come and go, and you have to hold your tongue and bide your time if you want to go on living in this world. And there ain’t any other, and so you might as well.

  Elizabeth took things too much to heart. If she hadn’t of been too good and too sweet all those years, she might of seen him coming too, Jewell Rife. She might of known him for what he was. But she couldn’t see it until too late, and wouldn’t own up to it then, not even to herself, in fact I don’t know to this day if she ever did, ever let herself know exactly what all went on in those bad years. I doubt it. Because the road, that seemed so twisty and full of holes, straightened out after a time, and she kept on walking it, and holding her head high, and after a while, it was like those years were just a ghost town she’d walked through and then decided to forget. I’ve not got much patience with that. I’ll take it all, whatever comes, it’s the way I am. Ain’t nothing else coming, the way I see it, so you might as well take what you can get. Take it all. I can’t forget a thing, either, or won’t, I reckon. I’m old as I can be now, and I remember all of it.

  You can see how it happened. It was bad times after Daddy died. A lot of drifters came around in those days looking for work, looking for anything, I guess, and for a girl like Elizabeth it was hard to judge a man like that, him not being from the county here, and her having no way to place him, or know who his people were. She hadn’t been anywhere, or done anything, remember, in spite of the airs she put on. She was a girl who had spent all her days in a house on a hill, mooning. Oh she fell for Ransom McClain, and fell hard, or thought she did, but she couldn’t keep him. A man, even a man as mincy as Ransom McClain, don’t want a little stuffed doll. There’s more to it than pink satin ribbons and sitting in a swing. But she didn’t know about that. She didn’t know a thing. And so she stayed on in this house, and Fay with her, getting paler, getting older, getting too dressed up to go to town. A few more years and she would of been a laughingstock, a crazy old maid, like Grace Harrison or Miss Mona Pike. She was right there on the verge of it. She stayed on up here, while down below, the hard times hit, and many’s the man that was out of work, and the drifters started coming into town.

  They had heard tell of work at the mills or the quarry, but when they got here, they found one mill boarded up, that used to be ours, and then the Wilsons lost theirs in 1931, and the quarry quit about then, too. So there wasn’t nothing for them to do here after all, and after a while they moved on and a while after that, they just stopped coming. I used to see them standing around the depot, when I’d come into town with Marvin on a Saturday, or standing around the hotel. I was a married girl then. I’d see the
m standing around there, shifting their feet, their eyes hot and staring. They didn’t have a thing, most of them. It was awful. I’d look away real quick, I was pretty then.

  But one time, it was right after Christmas, one of them caught my eye, and I found out later who it was. Jewell Rife. I never knew it before I saw him up here later, at Elizabeth’s house. But when I saw him that first time, downtown, he stood with one foot up on the hitching rail we still had out in front of the bank then, and the bank was closed behind him, and he was smoking a cigarette and looking out at the street like he owned it, cars and trucks and people to boot. He held his head cocked to the side. He had a yellow-and-brown plaid suit, and no coat. He didn’t look like he was cold, though. He had curly black hair. His eyes were light, and kind of far away. He was just watching everything and everybody. Looking for an opportunity. He was big, too, or bigger than most of the men around here. It crossed my mind that he might of been in a circus sometime. He looked like that.

  The way it happened was that their gas heater went out up there right in the dead of winter, late January it was, and Elizabeth had phoned down to tell Mr. Bascom and ask him to come up there and take a look at it. Mr. Bascom used to play poker with Daddy, and he tried to see to things for Elizabeth and Fay. When she’d let him. She was so proud, she wouldn’t let anybody do much, ever, or even tell me or anybody else if she was to get sick. They could of died up there, and she was too good to let anybody help her. Including me—me most of all, I reckon. But Mr. Bascom was the best-hearted man. He ran the hardware, and fixed whatever needed fixing all over town—wasn’t anybody building much, in those days—and he’d take some of those drifters in sometimes, and let them sleep in that back room at the store, and help them out if he had any work. Well, he had took in Jewell Rife, who had a definite way about him, everybody said it and it was true, and he took Jewell Rife with him up to Elizabeth’s to look at that gas heater. This was one of those old Ruud heaters, and from time to time you had to get them blown out.