Then I stopped on the walk outside and pulled out the postcard, wondering once again how I could be so dumb. The First Union Tabernacle, of course! The minister or reverend or whatever he was would not only most certainly tell me where the Tidewaters lived, but also what they were like. Just from reading his expression, I would probably know if they’d all gone to hell, or were regular churchgoers, or whatever.
A church steeple rose in the distance, and since I saw no other churchlike building, I hurried towards it. Just then, a bell tolled. I took this as a sign that I was on the right track. I walked on and listened to the tolling and then realized what it had tolled: four o’clock. That didn’t give me much time until the only train I could take came through. It would be impossible even to walk as far as the church and get all the way back to the station.
Defeated, I turned and trod back.
And never a Tidewater had I seen.
EIGHT
When the First Union Tabernacle bus was letting off its passengers on this Sunday, I looked for the girl I had seen on the station platform. Ever since I had seen her there, it had bothered me the way she seemed not to fit in Cold Flat Junction. It was like suddenly being pulled out of a fantasy in a movie house when someone walks in front of the screen and casts his shadow over the actors there. But I did not see her, so I guess she wasn’t of the First Union Tabernacle faith.
The bench outside Britten’s store was occupied on this particular day by the same old man, who always had a wad of chewing tobacco he pulled at the way I do at taffy and who always wore a faded blue railroad cap. After I’d left Britten’s with my box of jujubes, I sat down at the other end to wait for Ubub and Ulub. The old man looked over at me, probably thinking that something really interesting might be happening today since there was this new person on the bench. Of course he’d seen me, as I had him, a hundred times before, going in and out of the store, but this seating arrangement must have struck him as novel. He said, “Evenin’,” though it was still afternoon. I imagine he probably had his dinner around four o’clock, like so many old people who tend to get up really early—dawn, I’d’ve bet—and go to bed the same way. I smiled at him and said “Hello” and that was our conversation.
We sat there counting cars, me eating my jujubes, him chewing his tobacco, until finally the Woods came along down the narrow gravel path beside the store. They went in, but came out soon, both with bottles of Nehi grape. They both nodded and smiled, and I did too, getting up to give them their regular seats, but Ubub told me, “Knit dow, knit dow,” which I guess was “Sit down,” for he patted the air downward with his palm. I sat next to the man in the railroad cap, and Ubub sat next to me with Ulub on the end.
Now we were four. I offered my jujubes around and they all took only one—not much if you know jujubes. Ulub waited to see what Ubub was going to do with his jujube, and when Ubub put it in his shirt pocket, Ulub put his away too. The man in the railroad cap had not put his teeth in that day, but he gummed the jujube around, mixing its fruity taste with the Mail Pouch tobacco. You’ve got to be careful of jujubes if you’ve got teeth, for once one gets stuck in a crevice it’s like cement. I once told Marge that the dentist in town should use jujubes for fillings.
The three of them seemed very pleased I was there, as we sat with our candy and pop and Mail Pouch, and I did fit in pretty well, I thought. I have always been rather unusual in this regard—that I take on the coloring of whatever I’m experiencing at the moment and blend in with it. Sometimes I think I could be used to plug up holes in things with this way I have of becoming where I am. I like to think this is a compliment to myself, but I’m not sure.
Anyway, it was nice to know that just my presence created an enjoyable novelty for them. The Woods knew who I was, because they lived in a frame house in a muddy quarter-acre across the road from the back driveway of the hotel. They had also done a few odd jobs around the grounds. Our regular handyman, Wilton Macreedy, doesn’t like them and calls them “retards” and “idiots.” As far as I’m concerned there is no bigger idiot than Wilton Macreedy, who’s a drinker and spends a lot of time over in the El Lobo Bar and Grille that the Sheriff wants Ree-Jane to stay out of. It’s located between Hebrides and La Porte, and Wilton Macreedy drives his ancient Ford pickup over there and starts fights. He’s mean and has a jealous nature. You’d have to be really poor in spirit to be jealous of the Woods, but that’s what Wilton is.
I didn’t want to call them “Ulub” and “Ubub,” for I wasn’t sure but what it might offend them. I didn’t think they were both named Bob, so I sat there trying to figure out how to address them. Well, of course: “Mr. Wood” would be the proper way. So I asked Mr. Wood (Ubub) if he could think back forty years or more, and was it true he and (I nodded towards Ulub) the other Mr. Wood there had worked for a family named Devereau that lived in that house out on the lake. The house where no one lives anymore.
“Len seh,” Ubub said. “Duen-rwoh.” He knit his brow with the effort. I would like to have told him that the way he pronounced the “reau” in “Devereau” made me want to take him right along to the hotel and have him say hello to Ree-Jane. He was made to order for pronouncing that crazy French name just the way she said. Imagine, Ubub Wood, the only person who could really pronounce “Réjane”! I tucked that away to tell her.
When Ubub was saying this, Ulub was watching him intently and making lip movements in imitation of Ubub’s. Then Ulub nodded several times, and Ubub nodded, too. Ubub expanded on what he’d said: “Wuhwr da aw un suahmu.”
I moved these sounds around in my mind for a while and decided he’d said something about “one summer,” and then deduced it was “worked one summer.” I asked him if that was right, and again he nodded his head eagerly. Ulub smiled at his brother’s success.
It might have been better to ask things that could have been answered yes or no, but I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to know (except about the cat), and, anyway, that struck me as a little insulting. Ubub clearly didn’t mind trying; therefore, I shouldn’t either. Then I thought of a question that might really tell me something.
“Did you like them? The Devereaus?”
Both of them shook their heads immediately and fiercely. “Nah!” The syllable exploded from Ubub’s mouth.
“How come?” I asked, noticing the tobacco chewer was leaning forward, elbows on knees and hands clasped before him, rapt, wanting to know, it appeared, the answer.
Ubub looked up at the sky, stretching his long neck, and scratching it, as if he were turning over in his mind the best way to phrase what he wanted to say. Finally he said, “A din tah.” Ulub nodded his head in vigorous agreement with his brother.
“A din tah,” I repeated mentally over and over, trying to figure it out. A din tah. I was fairly sure “A” was “They.” “A din” must have been “They didn’t.” But “tah”? What was “tah”? I hated for Ubub to think I hadn’t understood him, so I tried to make it sound as if I were just meditating over the implications of the words, and not the words themselves.
“Hmmm,” I said, myself studying the sky, “so they didn’t . . .”
“Tah. Tah-eh—” He tried but couldn’t get out what I bet was some consonant.
“Talk!” I said. “Talk?”
Again, both nodded happily.
“Mr. Wood, you’re saying the Devereau sisters didn’t talk?”
Nod.
“To you, you mean?”
Shake of the head. Both heads. No, they didn’t mean exactly that.
“Nuch . . . N-uhn . . . En-itch Uhu-er.” Poor Ubub. He was trying so hard to be understood.
The old man beside me was frowning as hard as I was over this exchange. He scratched the stubble of gray hair beneath his cap, resettled it on his head, and said, “ ‘Each other.’ Ain’t that what you’re sayin’? They didn’t talk to each other?”
Ulub and Ubub seemed incredibly grateful to him, nodding eagerly.
“They didn’t talk to each othe
r?”
Enthusiastic nods. The old man looked mightily pleased and spat out a long stream of tobacco, as if he’d earned the right.
It was a little like playing charades. I wanted to ask, Why not? Why not?, but I doubted the two of them would know, even if they could have expressed it.
“You mean you never heard them talk to each other?”
“Nah du war—” Ubub’s face started working, his tongue trying to form sounds that wanted to stay locked within his mouth, slipping around, getting no purchase, like a climber trying to find secure footing on a glass mountain.
Everyone watched in suspense; we couldn’t help it.
Finally he blurted out, “Mur-rah.”
And Ulub nodded.
Ubub added: “Uh-uhv-win.”
Mary-Evelyn! I thought, at the same time the old man slapped his knee and exclaimed, “Mary-Eva!”
“Mary-Evelyn,” I said. “You’re saying that the sisters never talked to Mary-Evelyn?”
Both of them looked at me, at the old man, at each other, nodding all the while.
“But—” I was stunned by this news. Stunned. In whatever my mother (or anyone) had told me about the Devereau sisters, never was there any suggestion that they were “abnormal” in any way. My mother never said anything about the sisters’ not being able to talk, or anything like that. They came to the hotel, all of them together, or in pairs (never alone, apparently), and with Mary-Evelyn. They must have ordered their food or conversed with the other guests, just like anybody else. So it wasn’t that they couldn’t talk, but that they wouldn’t.
By this time, I had got up off the bench and was standing in front of the Woods. Maybe I could understand Ubub better if I watched his face. “Didn’t you ever hear them say anything to Mary-Evelyn?”
Emphatically, Ubub shook his head. So did Ulub, and not, I thought, just in imitation of his brother. No, they had never heard them say anything to her. Then Ubub offered: “Nu-ee th-thun uh uhn ee.” Ulub turned to Ubub and they both nodded, confirming this statement.
And the old man, who’d edged closer to them and was now Official Interpreter, again mouthed Ulub’s word forms and exclaimed: “Funny! They thought it was funny.” He meant the Woods did.
Both nodded and grinned at him.
I knew the Woods didn’t mean funny “laughable,” but funny “strange.” To me it was worse than strange; it was scary.
“But you were only there a short time,” I said. “Maybe they just didn’t want to talk in front of strangers. Or something.”
Ubub considered this, bringing his long, oil-begrimed fingers to his forehead. But he had set his face to a certainty and was shaking his head. He made small, grunting noises and then looked upwards, closing and unclosing his small hands. He had the look of a person who meant to throw a tantrum at God, and I can’t say I blamed him. (I knew all about tantrums.) Then he lowered his head, as if he were in disgrace. (I knew all about disgrace, too.) Ulub simply put his hand on his brother’s arm and patted him into a sort of dark, frustrated quiet.
I thought how awful it would be to be speechless (though I imagined some people—Lola Davidow chief among them—wouldn’t mind too much if such a fate befell me). And since I was pretty sure the Woods neither read nor wrote, how it would be to have no means of communication excepting if they found someone, or some occasion when someone really wanted to understand them, such as this one.
Yet the two of them together (and they were never apart) seemed almost pleased with things. I’ve always thought it dumb, really dumb, to comment on other people’s happiness—that is, whether they were or were not happy—but the Woods had an air about them as if they were more or less happy. Such as when they would be eating their lunch in the Rainbow, listening to the regulars at the counter kidding around, and they’d smile as if they were included in all of the buffoonery. And, naturally, they liked the Rainbow because Maud was there, and always insisted on waiting on them; she wouldn’t let Shirl do it because Shirl teased them—Shirl could bury a lot of nastiness underneath a quirky little smile (and even that smile looked mean, I thought) and pretend she couldn’t understand what Ulub or Ubub were pointing to on the menu. But Maud would tell them the specials and tell them if anything was particularly good that day. They really liked that, being treated like anybody else, and sometimes would ponder over their order, but they always wound up pretty much with the same thing: hot roast beef sandwich and mashed potatoes and gravy.
I wondered, too, if their memories might not even be better than the rest of ours because they could keep them clearer, so to speak, and depended on them more, and were much deeper into their own thoughts than others were. They weren’t clouding over their memories with a lot of talk.
I said to Ubub, hoping he would understand that I had understood him, “You don’t think—you think they never talked to her. To Mary-Evelyn.”
Ubub raised his head, nodding and looking happier. Then he added: “Uf Mur-ur-ah tahn nu-uhn ah-ah-ahnwur.”
This was truly inscrutable. I mulled it over, frowning deeply. I think the “uf” must have been “if.” So I said, “If Mary . . .” They nodded, encouragingly. But what was “tahn”? “Talk,” maybe. “If Mary talked . . .”
Heavy nods.
But I couldn’t get the rest. The old man was thinking deeply and finally said—he was really incredible—“No one answered. Ain’t no one answered her, right?”
The Woods were almost gleeful, both of them. “Yuh, yuh,” said Ubub.
“So if this Mary-Evan person talked,” the old man went on with authority, “nobody talked back, nobody answered her.” He spat a stream of tobacco again, wiped the back of his hand over his mouth and looked at his shoes. “That poor little girl must’ve had the blue devils.”
“What’s the blue devils?” I asked.
Mr. Root pursed his lips, thinking. “Some call it the de-pression, like. I call it the worst kind of misery. Misery’s misery.” Then he was silent, as if he knew.
NINE
I should have known better than to tell anyone about my exchange with the Woods, but I was so wrought up about what I’d discovered that when I got back to the hotel, I did. It was during Sunday dinner.
We were at the “family table” in the rear of the dining room. Mrs. Davidow, Ree-Jane, Will and me, and, off-and-on, my mother, when she didn’t have to dart through the swing door into the kitchen, her dinner getting cold all the while. She had so much to do at mealtimes that she often ate her dinner standing up in the kitchen.
Lola Davidow certainly didn’t have to eat standing up; by dinnertime she was usually so “oiled and lubed” (as Will put it) that she couldn’t stand up straight, anyway. That night she was eating her steak. Filet mignon, her diet food. She’s always going on grapefruit-and-steak diets, which sounds all right until you throw in the pitcher of martinis. The rest of us were eating fried chicken, including Ree-Jane, except she always gets white meat. That’s understood, and one of the waitresses had got a real tongue-lashing from Mrs. Davidow once because she had made the unforgivable error of putting the white meat in front of me and serving the chicken leg to Ree-Jane. The plates were exchanged, but not before I got my fork prongs into that chicken breast and wrenched out a big bite.
This is an ongoing argument for me. It makes me absolutely furious. I wouldn’t mind at all taking turns about the white meat, but to have Ree-Jane always get the favored part of the chicken was unbearable. Neither would I mind so much if my mother didn’t own that chicken, so to speak, for it’s she who’s the Paradise part of that “family table” (you can bet Aurora always gets white meat of chicken), and not the Davidows. Of course, Ree-Jane just gloats fit-to-kill every time fried chicken appears on the menu.
No matter how often I point out this favoritism to her, my mother won’t do anything about it. She always says that guests prefer white meat, and she has to make sure she holds some back in case a party orders it. Well, I said, if that’s the point, then it should be he
ld back from Ree-Jane, too. Why make a fuss about such a little thing? is always my mother’s fuming response as she bangs around the pots and pans preparing to shut down for the night. She can’t stand all of this “dissension,” she keeps saying to me. All she wants is some peace and quiet. Well, I say, all I want is some white meat of chicken.
But this particular dinnertime I didn’t care much about the drumstick I was eating (much to Ree-Jane’s disappointment, I’m sure, for her gloating went unattended), because I was too excited about what I’d found out.
“. . . And they said her aunts wouldn’t talk to her. Isn’t that horrible?”
At the other end of the table, Ree-Jane was laughing, heaving with silent laughter, and I assume had been all during my account. I felt my throat tighten. “What’s so funny?”
The laughter now was audible. The words came out, broken a little: “. . . can just (har har) hear it now. I can (har har) hear it. You (har har) and the Woods (har har) mumbling and grunting . . .”—and here she made some disgusting sounds intended to mimic Ulub and Ubub.
Her mother shook a little too, with laughter. I will say that Lola Davidow didn’t always back up her daughter in Ree-Jane’s nastier moments. Actually, I don’t think Mrs. Davidow was a nasty person; Ree-Jane was. But Mrs. Davidow was pretty “lubed” tonight, and I guess laughter came easy to her.
Even Will joined in, sucking up to them. That really made me angry, and I flashed him a razor-sharp look. He knew he was being mean and stopped and said, “Well, sometimes I can understand them. Big Bob I can understand sometimes.”
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