Oh, poor, poor Jackie.
***
Just as I reached for the phone to call Jake again—the lines had been busy when I’d tried before--Walter Cronkite slipped his glasses on and read from a sheet of paper, “From Dallas, Texas…the flash, apparently official…President Kennedy died at…” He took off his glasses. “…one p.m. Central Standard Time…” He glanced up at an unseen clock on the wall. “…two o’clock Eastern Standard Time…some…” He glanced up again. “…38 minutes ago.” He then put his glasses back on, and seemingly overcome with emotion, looked down with a slight shake of his head.
I slowly hung up the phone and sat on the edge of the sofa, my trembling hand covering my mouth as tears streamed down my face. I’d known the announcement was coming. I realized now I’d known it from the beginning, from the very first announcement about the shooting. But still, when Walter Cronkite said the word, “died,” my stomach had plunged, and now, my heart felt as if it had crumbled into dust.
My tears were not just for Jackie and those poor little ones, Caroline and John-John. But for the world. What kind of world did we live in that would murder the best leader America had ever had? One thing was for sure, and it didn’t take a scholar to figure it out. This was more than the murder of a president. It was the murder of a country’s innocence.
I heard Jake’s key in the lock as footage from Dallas continued to run across the TV screen—dazed-looking policemen, dismayed onlookers, shots of the Texas School Book Depository, from which authorities believed the lethal gunfire had come. It was a nightmare. A national nightmare.
Without any memory of actually walking across the room, I found myself at the door as Jake stepped inside. I saw by his face that he knew. His skin was pale as milk, his eyes haunted.
“Oh, Jake…” I broke into sobs, throwing myself into his arms. “It’s just so awful! Why? How could anyone do such a horrible thing?”
He wrapped his arms around me, silently holding me close. I felt his lips touch the top of my head, and despite all the pain and horror this day had brought, I was comforted by the warmth of him, the even thud of his heartbeat beneath my ear. As I clung to him, my heart welled with love. He might not be perfect, but he was mine. And when the chips were down, he was here for me. The thought brought Jackie to mind again, and I sobbed harder. Oh, that poor, poor woman. The horror she must’ve felt as those bullets ripped into her husband, splashing her with his blood.
After a long moment, Jake drew away from me and gently tilted my chin up so he could look me in the eyes. “Lil, hon. You’ve…” He cleared his throat once, and then again, staring off at the wall as if he couldn’t quite meet my gaze. “Sweetheart, you’ve got to be strong for me. I’ve got something to tell you. Something bad.”
“I kn…know!” I stuttered. “I’ve been watching it since it happened. Oh, Lord, Jake! The kids! Do you think they know? Surely the school will let them out early. They let you out early.” I saw then that Jake had tears in his eyes. Tears! My heart gave a twinge. He hadn’t even voted for JFK. Thought he was too damn liberal. But yet, here he was crying at the news. “Oh, honey…” I hugged him to me. It was my turn to do the comforting.
Gently, but firmly, Jake pulled away, took me by the arm and led me over to the sofa. “Sit down, Lily Rae. This isn’t about JFK.” He sat down next to me and took my hands in his.
I stared at him. “Then what is it?” When he didn’t say anything, terror stabbed through me. “Has something happened to one of the girls?”
He shook his head. “No, they’re fine. I called Jinx and asked her to pick them up at school. We’ve got to head to Russell Springs.”
I shook my head before he finished speaking. “Why? What’s going on? Wh___?”
Jake pressed two fingers to my lips to stop me. “Shhhhh…you’ve got to listen to me, Lillian.” His eyes were pleading, his mouth a thin, bleak line.
Lillian. My heart plummeted. He never called me Lillian unless he was dead-serious. I met his gaze. “I’m listening. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“I got a call at the factory from your father. Landry was in a car accident early this morning outside of Elizabethtown. He was on Rt. 61 on his way home to Opal Springs when a drunk driver crossed the center line and hit him head-on. I’m sorry, Lily. He was killed instantly.”
I blinked. Landry? Landry? I began to shake my head. No. Jake was wrong. He had his signals mixed up. JFK died today, not Landry. Not sweet-tempered, good-hearted Landry.
“You’re wrong,” I said. I wrenched my hands out of his and jumped up from the sofa. “Daddy is wrong! Someone’s got their signals mixed up, that’s all.”
On legs that felt like toothpicks, I paced the small living room. I whirled around. “I just talked to him last night on the phone. Why would he be heading home today? He’s coming for Thanksgiving next week! You know why?” I glared at Jake, suddenly furious at the look of pity on his face. “He was going to ask Annette to marry him this weekend. He had a special night planned…dinner at this fancy restaurant. He bought the ring, Jake! He told me he’s going to order a bottle of wine and drop the ring in her glass, just like in the movies…”
“Lily, hon…” Jake said softly, taking a step toward me.
“No!” I stamped my foot in fury. “Goddamn it! Quit looking at me like that. It’s not Landry! My brother is not dead!” My stomach churned. My blood had turned to ice water.
Jake came closer, his hand outstretched, his face etched with sorrow. I wanted to scream, but the lump thickening in my throat wouldn’t allow it.
Slowly, Jake took me in his arms, his hand cupping the back of my head, squashing my pony-tail. I sucked in a ragged breath. “He was going to ask Annette to marry him,” I whispered.
And then I began to cry softly against his work shirt.
***
Another gravesite at Poplar Grove. Last time, it had been Lonnie, Jinx’s husband. Last time, Landry had been one of the mourners. Impossible to believe he was gone now, his broken remains relegated to that gleaming blue casket resting over a yawning hole dug out of the red Kentucky clay, waiting to be lowered after the mourners finished the second verse of “Rock of Ages.”
It was a beautiful late autumn day with sunshine and a cold gusty wind that stirred up leaves of orange and crimson and sent them dancing across the graveyard in frenzied dervishes. The skirts of the female mourners billowed and whipped, and the men and women who were foolish enough to wear hats had to hold onto them for dear life.
Dry-eyed, I watched Landry’s coffin being lowered into the ground next to Charles Alton’s grave. I knew I should be crying. That’s what you were supposed to do at funerals, after all. But I couldn’t cry anymore. I’d always heard that pain was sometimes too deep for tears, but I’d never believed it.
I believed it now.
The entire country was in mourning, I knew. President Kennedy had been buried at Arlington Cemetery yesterday. The day before, Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of JFK, had been shot on TV before my tear-stained eyes, and I’d barely comprehended it. On Friday when Walter Cronkite broke into “As the World Turns” to deliver the horrifying news about the assassination, I couldn’t have imagined how things could get worse.
Now, I just wanted to go back in time. Back to my grief for a beloved, but distant man, the leader of my country. The grief I’d felt for him was nothing to what I felt for Landry. My sweet, tender-hearted brother, the rock that had been there for me throughout my childhood, was gone forever.
Brother Joe Bob, looking like he was at death’s door himself, wheezed his way through one last prayer for Landry’s soul, and with a mumbled “amen,” I looked up and saw that Daddy was already leading Mother back toward the line of cars parked along the south side of the graveyard. Edsel and Norry, their faces pale as winter, filed behind them. An irrational anger swept over me.
What was wrong with my parents? It was their child they were leaving behind here. How could they be so damn accepting a
bout death? I wanted to rush over to Mother, grab her by her frail arm and give her a shake. How can you lose two children, Mother, and still maintain your faith in God? What gives you that kind of strength and courage?
But I already knew what her answer would be. She would say something about God’s will and how He never gives you more sorrow than you can take. Same old mumbo-jumbo Southern Baptist bull-crap, I thought bitterly.
Jake’s hand tightened on my arm. “You ready to go, Lily?”
I glanced over at the church to my right—the church of my childhood. So many memories inside that clapboard building—Sunday School classes, Vacation Bible School afternoons, Christmas programs with the choir, giggling with Daisy during the god-awful tedious sermons on those sweltering August Sunday mornings. I hadn’t stepped foot into the place since Lonnie’s funeral—until today. And I knew in my heart that the next time I walked through those doors, it would be to attend another funeral. I refused to even think about whose it would be. One thing I was sure of, though. There was nothing inside that church for me.
“Hon?”
I turned slowly and looked at Jake. A gust of wind pierced through my wool coat, and I shivered.
“Let’s go,” Jake said, guiding me toward the car. “There’ll be hot coffee on at your mother’s.”
“No.” I stopped and turned to him. “I want to go pick up the girls, and then I want to go home. Not to Mother’s. Back to Bowling Green.”
Arrah Wanna’s Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies
1 cup white sugar
1 cup powdered sugar
1 cup butter
1 cup oil
2 eggs
4 cups flour
1 tsp. cream of tartar
1 tsp. soda
2 tsp. vanilla
1 tsp. salt
Mix dry ingredients and add the rest. Chill one hour. Roll 1 teaspoon dough into a ball. Press down with glass dipped in sugar. Bake 8-10 minutes at 375 degrees.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
July 1969
I tapped furiously on the Smith-Corona I’d rescued from a yard sale last August, breathing in its oily, inky scent—a scent that never failed to put me into a state of excitement. If someone asked me why, I probably wouldn’t have been able to explain it, but I figured it had something to do with freedom. I felt free when I typed on the Smith-Corona, free to unleash my creativity and get it down on paper.
I’d started the new romance novel last September when the girls went off to school, and every afternoon between 1:30 and 3:30, I’d worked on it. By the time Debby Ann and Kathy Kay got off the school bus at 4:00, the typewriter was put away in its case in my closet, and I was in the kitchen preparing their after-school snack.
The novel had been inspired by a week-long visit with Norry who worked in the business office at the Indianapolis Speedway. At 26, Norry was the only female public relations representative in the Speedway office, and was quickly building a name for herself in the racing world. Last August, she’d invited me and the girls up to stay in her gorgeous apartment in Speedway, complete with a community swimming pool, which might as well have been Disneyland as far as the girls were concerned. It hadn’t been easy dragging them out of the pool, even for the tour of the Indianapolis 500 track that Norry had arranged for us. But that day at the track had been the first glimmer of a novel idea for me. I hadn’t said a word about it to anyone, but a week after returning home, I found the Smith-Corona at a yard sale, and knew it was a sign. I had to write that romance novel!
Up until May, the only two people in the world that knew about it were Norry and Betty. It only came out into the open when a registered letter with the return address of The Indianapolis Motor Speedway arrived one morning containing four tickets to the race on Memorial Day Weekend. The girls had been beside themselves with excitement, and even Jake had been impressed. But when Norry wanted us to come up early so I could have a tour of Gasoline Alley, it all came out about the novel. Jake’s reaction had been pretty much what I expected—amazement followed by patronizing amusement—but I’d been prepared this time, and easily deflected his condescending remarks with an acid retort.
“Ridicule all you want, Jake Tatlow, but I’m going to do what I’ve been wanting to do all these years, and this time, your mean little remarks aren’t going to stop me. And you just wait and see. I’m going to get a book published. There’s a romance publisher in Canada called Harlequin, and that’s where I’m aiming to sell to…or I’m going to die trying.”
He’d been so flabbergasted at my outburst that he hadn’t uttered another word about it. We’d all gone to the Indianapolis 500 and sat on the main straightaway in seats that usually sold for $50 a piece to watch Mario Andretti get the checkered flag. But even that hadn’t been as exciting as the tour around Gasoline Alley that Norry took me on a few days before the race. There, I’d got to meet famous drivers like Peter Revson and Dan Gurney…and even the handsome Italian, Mario himself--and although I could only talk to them through a fence because of the “Men Only” policy of the famous garage area, it was still thrilling. Actually getting to see the workings of the drivers’ garages had been enough to fire up my imagination so I could add vivid new scenes to Swedish Passion, my story about a Swedish race car driver and a journalist from Indianapolis.
And now, here I was, writing the final chapter. From the radio on top of the refrigerator, Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” came on. I glanced up at the Corvette clock on the kitchen wall and began to type faster. Betty would be here within the hour, and I wanted to be able to type “The End” and have the stack of manuscript pages ready to hand over to her. Of course, Betty would be my first reader.
Brad sighed and his eyes re-focused on the bright blue race car as it pulled into Victory Lane at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway…
The back door squeaked open, and 16-year-old Debby Ann sauntered into the house, long-legged and trim in her paisley purple bikini, her body slathered in baby oil mixed with iodine in the hopes of attaining a tan just like the ones sported by the California girls in Teen Magazine.
Casting a glance over at me, she blew her bangs out of her eyes, ala Sally Field in “Gidget” and made a bee-line for the refrigerator. I hid a smile and kept typing. Although Debby Ann’s new heroine was Peggy Lipton from “The Mod Squad,” she couldn’t quite shake the mannerisms she’d picked up from Sally Field.
Grabbing the Tupperware container of iced tea, Debby said, “How’s the book coming along, Mommy?”
“Almost done,” I muttered, my eyes fixed on the tiny keys splatting onto the paper. “Be sure and put that top back on the pitcher the right way. Last time, I spilled it all over the cabinet because it was loose.”
“I didn’t do it,” was Debby Ann’s automatic reply, accompanied by a Geez-aren’t-you-an-idiot roll of her eyes. “When’s your friend coming?” From the decorative bunny rabbit cookie jar on the counter, she grabbed one of Great-Aunt Arrah Wanna’s sugar cookies and began munching.
“Soon.”
Debby Ann took a long draw of iced tea from a pale pink Tupperware tumbler and ran her fingers through her long, stick-straight brown hair. “I can’t wait to meet Davy. I just hope he’s not a drag. Did I like him when we were babies?”
I suppressed a sigh, stopped typing and looked up. “You got along fine with Davy when you were babies. Maybe it was because you were both brats.”
She rolled her eyes again and tried to hide a grin. “Well, God! Tell it like it is, Mother!”
“That’s what I just did.”
She put the top back on the pitcher and shoved it back in the refrigerator. “Well, I’ll be in the back. Call me when they get here.”
I eyed her curvy little bottom as she sash-shayed toward the back door. “I don’t suppose I can convince you to put some clothes on before they get here?”
She glanced back, her eyes big and brown under her thick, long bangs and gave me a saucy smile. “Are you kidding, man?”
“I’m
not a man!” I shouted, wincing as the screen door slammed behind her. If Jake were here, he’d jerk a knot in her pretty little behind and make her change clothes. But I didn’t have the time or the energy to argue with my eldest. I had to get this book finished.
I began to type again, but before I could finish one sentence, the front door opened, and a shrill scream erupted from the living room, followed by the sound of thumping footsteps. It was as if a herd of elephants were being driven through the house.
Blond-headed Paul John burst into the room, his grinning face grimy with dirt. “Miss Lily, tell her to stop! She’s got a lizard!”
Twelve-year-old Kathy Kay appeared behind him, her face just as filthy and her eyes sparkling with glee. In one hand, she held a wriggling lizard. “Ooooh, oooooh,” she taunted. “Mr. Big Shot is afraid of a itty-bitty little lizard!”
“Get that thing away from me!” Paul John screamed, running out the back door.
Kathy Kay followed behind, laughing uproariously. Nothing had changed between those two, still best friends despite their gender difference. Probably because Kathy Kay was such a tomboy. Or maybe it was because Paul John was such a sissy.
I typed faster.
…Oh, but there is another lovely lady here who is waiting for her kiss. Sven’s wife, Laura."
The phone rang. I ignored it.
"Sven Johannsen is also joined in the winner's circle by his young adopted son, Stephen, and of course, it was announced here last week that there is going to be a new addition to the Johannsen family in mid-December. Won't that be a nice Christmas gift? Word has it that Sven is hoping for a girl who'll look just like her mother..."
It kept ringing. Finally, my fingers stilled on the typewriter keys. “Damn!”
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