by Robert Inman
“Sometimes,” Min countered, “you have to go out of your way.” She paused for a moment, and then, for the very first time in the entire conversation she turned from the stove and face him. She smiled pleasantly, at least with her mouth. “But let’s not get into that.”
*****
The convenience store was closed on Sunday. Baggetts had never operated a store on Sunday and never would, Min said. So she was at home all day. She bustled about the house -- cleaning, mopping, dusting. He helped a little, polishing the silver tea service in the dining room. They were massive, heavy, ornate pieces -- coffee and tea pots, cream pitcher, sugar bowl, all of it on a huge tray with the Baggett name and family crest etched in the metal. Squire Baggett, the original Wilbur, had it shipped from England when he built the house, Min told him.
“This stuff must be worth a fortune,” Will said to Billy Hargreave when he stopped by at mid-day. Billy was sitting at the other end of the dining room table. Min had set him to work cleaning crystals she had removed from the chandelier.
“The house is full of it,” Billy said. “Silver, porcelain, furniture, paintings. No telling how much.”
Will looked around to make sure Min was nowhere near. He could hear the vacuum cleaner running back in the study. “Doesn’t Min worry about somebody breaking in?”
“If she does, she doesn’t tell me about it.”
“Don’t you? Worry? You’re the sheriff.”
“Will, you’ve been here long enough this visit to get a good look around. Do you notice any changes from the time you were a teenager?”
“No.”
“Well, there aren’t any, not as I can see.”
Will thought about it. “When I woke up the first morning, I thought for a moment I was in a museum.”
“You were. Are.”
“Why?”
“Min likes things just so.”
“What about the outside of the house? It looks pretty desperate.”
“I guess Min’s just doing the best she can, Will. It’s not something she talks about. But you’re family. Maybe you oughta bring all this sort of thing up with her.”
“How does that fit into your advice to keep my head up and my fanny down?”
“Hmmmm.” Billy hummed. But before he could answer, the vacuum cleaner shut off and they could hear Min’s footsteps in the hall. Billy gave him a wink. What did that mean?
Late on Sunday afternoon, in response to Will’s inquiry about whether there was anything to drink about the place, Min brought out an ancient bottle of scuppernong wine from a storage room off the back porch. The bottle was caked with dust. He decided not to ask its age. But the wine had a surprisingly nice gentle taste to it. She transferred it to a crystal decanter and served it in elaborate wine glasses on a silver tray. There was another tray of assorted cheeses and fruits. They sat in the front parlor as darkness began to settle over yard and liveoak and river and nibbled and sipped. Outside, it was still raining. The wind had picked up during the afternoon and occasionally it lashed against the windows. Five straight days of rain with little letup. Billy Hargreave had said there was flooding in low-lying areas in the counties around Wilmington.
They chatted amiably, mostly about the past. Min was an encyclopedia of Cape Fear history -- the families that had settled the riverbank, their commerce and social life, the imprint they had left on the land, their tales of elegance and tackiness.
“When you put down roots and cling to a place over time and protect it and nurture it, it means there’s something solid to you,” she said. “Most folks aren’t solid. They buy and sell places like they were some kind of cheap commodity. They pick up and move on a whim. They don’t have a sense of one place where they belong. And without that, you’re apt to act like there’s nothing solid in the rest of your life. You just gallop off in all directions at once.”
“Like me?”
“I suppose you’ve made the best of being stuck up there in Raleigh,” she answered mildly.
“I’ve never thought of it as being stuck. I chose Raleigh. Both Clarice and I wanted it.”
“Clarice wanted to go to Greensboro,” Min said. She said “Greensboro” the same way she did “Duke people.”
“Well, she’s close enough. And now that she’s doing so well in real estate, she’s perfectly happy in Raleigh. Selling big houses to all those rootless people. We’re both happy there. We have a nice home in a nice neighborhood. We wish you’d visit sometime.”
She sipped for awhile on her scuppernong wine and munched on a slice of apple, and then she said, “All that work you do in the yard. It proves my point.”
“Which point is that?”
“About attaching yourself to a plot of ground. You’re trying to put your mark on it.”
“Is that what I’m doing? I thought I was just trying to keep out the crabgrass.”
“So you’re going to stay in Raleigh?” It was the first time -- almost a week gone by, and the very first time -- she had brought up the subject of his job and general disaster. That, too was part of the unspoken thing in this house, the thing that hovered. Not just Min’s agenda, but also his own. He would have appreciated at least an acknowledgement of his dilemma. But he had bided his time.
“Of course I’m going to stay in Raleigh,” he said, perhaps a little more adamantly than necessary. Who was he trying to convince?
“And what are you going to do in Raleigh?”
He gave her a brief recitation of the bare facts -- the non-compete clause, all that business. Then, “Until something in television opens up -- and I’ve already had some feelers from other stations -- I’m open to possibilities. I’ve even considered politics. Morris -- you remember Morris -- mentioned my running for Mayor.”
“Baggetts aren’t politicians. Well, there was a distant cousin somewhere back in the Twenties. He ran for Congress, I think.”
“And?”
“Lost. He got on the wrong side of the evolution debate.”
“He was…”
“For it.”
“Well, I’m glad that’s no longer an issue. Most folks seem to have come to grips with the idea of monkeys in their past. At any rate, I’ve never heard of it being discussed at a Raleigh city council meeting. I think they’re more into things like traffic and garbage pickup.”
Will speared a small cube of cheese with a toothpick, placed it squarely in the middle of a Triscuit, and ate the whole thing in one bite. It was good cheese, a variety of local cheddar that Min brought home from the convenience store. She bought it by the large hoop and measured out whatever a customer wanted. A way, she said, of maintaining some touches of the old crossroads country store of the Baggett family’s past, even though it now had plate glass across the front and bright overhead fluorescent lighting and plastic bags for your purchases.
“It’s the best thing that ever happened to you, Wilbur,” she said.
“Political consideration?”
“Losing that TV job.”
“I loved that job,” he said quietly. “The way you love this house.”
“No,” she said, “it’s not anywhere near the same.”
“Well, maybe not.” He took a deep breath and stepped gingerly into uncharted waters. “I think you can hold onto something too long, Min.”
She stared at him for a long time, stone-faced. It was so quiet that a rattle of wind-driven rain against the parlor windows sounded like musket fire. Finally she said, “Do you want to elaborate on that, Wilbur?”
“This place,” he said with a sweep of his hand. “I know, it’s been…well, all you’ve said it is. But it’s so big. And all this stuff. God, I can’t imagine what it would appraise for. And you, here right by yourself -- I mean, I know Wingfoot comes and goes, but still, a lot of the time… Anyhow, you work so hard down at the store. Long hours and all. And I know from the local news in Raleigh that working in a convenience store can be dangerous sometimes, especially if you’re there by yourself. I mean, somebo
dy can walk in and hold up the place and if he’s high as a kite on some kind of junk, you don’t know what the heck he’ll do.” He could hear himself talking faster and faster, his voice rising, and he thought that he should probably back way off from this, but he was in pretty deep now and he didn’t know how to extricate himself without just going ahead and blurting the whole thing out, the thing that he had been mullling over all afternoon.
“I asked Billy this morning if you don’t worry about somebody breaking in here.”
“Why don’t you just ask me, Wilbur,” she said. Her voice was flat and hard.
“Well, don’t you?”
“No.” There was another long silence. He waited. “You don’t know anything about this place or my life here, or Wingfoot’s life, or any of the rest of it. You’ve spent the last umpteen years over there in Raleigh being Mister Television Personality. We’re just common folks here, Wilbur. Just living our common ordinary everyday lives in rural Brunswick County without benefit of celebrity status.”
“You’re anything but common folks, Min. You’re the Baggetts. I’ve had that drummed into me…”
“And you’re not? No, I guess you’re not. You’ve forgotten what it means.”
He put up his hands. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cause a ruckus.”
“No,” she said, “that’s quite all right, Wilbur. Let’s just go ahead and get this said. If you’re so worried about me, and about the store, and about the house, what do you think I should do? Give me the benefit of your carefully-considered opinion.”
“Forget it.”
“No,” she said sharply. “I insist.”
He chewed on it for a minute or so while she waited. “All right. You could deed the house to the county historical society. Take a huge tax write-off. Sell some of the contents. Sell the store. You’d have enough to be absolutely comfortable. Take a trip. Go around the world, for gosh sakes. If you stay here, it’s just gonna become more and more of a burden. I mean, look at all the work it needs right now.”
Min leaped to her feet, eyes blazing. “This is our home! If you don’t like it, get out!”
“Min…”
“It’s your fault! If you’d done what I asked you to do, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”
He gaped at her, open-mouthed. “What on earth can you possibly mean by that?”
An angry toss of her head. “I tried to get you to study business at Chapel Hill so you could come back and take over and get things back on track. But no, you had to study Show Biz.”
“Broadcast and film, Min. It’s a business, too.”
“Show Biz, Wilbur,” she spat. “And then you ran off to be Mister Celebrity and left me here holding the bag. Well, I’ve done the best I could. I’ve done just fine. I don’t need you. In fact, you’ve been nothing but trouble from the beginning. You and your goddamned…” She was fairly screaming now, fists clenched, face red and blotched.
“What, Min? Me and my goddamned what?” He was on his feet, ignoring his knee, halving the distance between her chair and his.
“You and your goddamned father!” she cried.
“It was an accident! It just happened. It was nobody’s fault.”
“He was flying the plane.”
“Min, dammit, you’re not gonna do that to me again, not like you did when I was a scared, miserable little thirteen-year-old boy. I’ve put all that behind me because I couldn’t be halfway sane otherwise. But you…you’ve had it stuck in your craw for thirty-five years. Truth of it is, you’re just plain stuck. Your daddy left you in charge, and so you’re stuck here in some sort of nutty time warp. Nothing can change. It all has to stay just the way it was when he left you in charge. You can’t do anything, so you just have to look for somebody to blame. Well, blame God if that’ll help you. But don’t blame the dead!”
She started to say something, but whatever it was strangled in her throat. Instead, she burst into tears and bolted from the room, leaving him standing there tottering on unsure legs, shaking with anger, shaken with the rage of her outburst. That, and the sheer disaster of having finally, after all these years, openly confronted that terrible thing between them. That unsaid, unapproached thing. It had happened so fast. Such an enormous thing, and so fast. The beast, dormant this great time, had come uncaged in the blink of an eye.
He staggered backward, slumped in his chair, lowered his face to his hands, made a blackness there and sat staring into it. With all that had happened to him, all of the disasters piling one upon another, now this. Why now, when it -- added to the crushing weight of everything else -- was simply more than he could handle? A few hours ago, he had been full of hope and optimism. All of the rest of it would work out, he just knew it. But this -- well, it had cast a pall over everything. Why? Maybe it was because this was so basic, so ancient, so at the core of who he was and all he had tried to be. If it made him feel so desolate and drained now, what effect had it had on him all these years? What kind of baggage had he toted around, not realizing that it was baggage, and that what was inside was so lethal?
He raised up finally. It was dark outside. The rain had stopped. He rose wearily, climbed the stairs, and went to bed. It was not until he was under the covers that he realized that he had left the crutches in the study, that he had mounted the stairs entirely on his own. His knee ached a bit now, but he couldn’t remember whether it had hurt as he climbed or not. The rest of him was just numb.
It took a long time for sleep to come. He kept thinking, over and over, I’ve got to go home. I’ve got to go home. But then, he couldn’t quite figure out where home was. Maybe he had never truly had one.
TEN
He woke the next morning to the sound of bumping and scraping overhead. He thought at first of a storm-blown limb, but then he saw the brightness at the edge of the curtains. He realized that the bumping and scraping was coming from the attic. He threw back the covers, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and hobbled to the window. He pulled back the curtains and was momentarily dazzled by sunlight. Overhead, something hit the floor with a thud.
“Min…” he called tentatively.
“Down in a minute,” she sang back.
He stood at the window for awhile. New sun danced on droplets of water still hanging from the leaves of the maple tree just outside and on the puddled yard below. He tugged at the window, trying to open it. Stuck. He banged on the frame with his hand to loosen decades of dried paint, then tried again. It came free with a loud crack as he heaved upward, opening the room to the wet, juicy smell of late Spring. The window screen had long ago rotted away, so there was nothing between him and the morning. He leaned far out and took a deep breath, inhaling the rich blooming scent of azalea and jasmine, hearing the buzz of insects around the honeysuckle that grew wild at the edge of the yard.
He heard the door open behind him and turned to see Min reaching into the room with a cup of coffee. She placed it on a table next to the door. “Breakfast is almost ready,” she said.
“Min…” But she was gone.
When he got to the kitchen several minutes later, she was at the stove, laboring over grits and scrambled eggs. The back door was open, letting the morning in. He stood in the doorway and watched her for a moment. “Min…”
She turned to him then, reaching for the coffee pot. “Sit down and have another cup. I’ll be finished with this in just a minute.”
He sat, staring at her, while she filled his cup, then went back to the stove. Not a twitch of muscle, not a thing out of place betrayed the slightest hint of what had gone on in the study hours before. She looked fresh, well-rested, glad unto the morning. Good God. Had it not happened? Had he just imagined or dreamed it because it was something that was stuck in his own craw that needed to get out? Did it really have nothing to do with Min?
“What was all that noise?” he asked finally.
“Go to the study after breakfast. You’ll see.”
“Don’t we need to talk, Min?”
>
“Not now. Later. After.” But she didn’t say after what.
She brought their plates to the table and they bowed their heads and she said grace and then they ate. She chatted amiably about the welcome break in the weather, the barge traffic on the river, the employment situation at the Sunny Point Military Terminal just downriver, the wholesale price of groceries, the Pakistani who helped her in the store. Will watched her in astonishment.
“I see you’re without your crutches,” she said.
“Yes. Last night…”
“That’s good. You’re on the mend. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as you thought.”
What?
“I guess I’ll be able to get on back to Raleigh pretty soon.”
“Why hurry? You said Clarice is away on a business trip. And there’s nothing for you to do there. Take your time. Maybe you’ll find some other things here to occupy your time and mind.” She bit off a chunk of toast, washed it down with coffee, and then jumped up. “Well, I better get on to work and find out what kind of mess that Pakistani has made of things this morning. I swear, it’s hard to get good help…” and then she was gone, her sturdy shoes clumping down the back hall and up the stairs.
She was back in a few minutes with her purse. “The study,” she said as she headed for the back door. “Call me if you have any questions.”
He sat there, flabbergasted, for a while longer. And then he got up and went to the study.
Time warp? He wondered if he were somehow thirteen years old again, entering the study at Uncle French’s bidding to hear a capsule history of the Baggetts and an analysis of the family psyche. All that was missing was Uncle French. There were the museum-like furnishings, of course, but there was also the great collection of crates and boxes he remembered from that long ago visit. So that’s what Min had been dragging down from the attic this morning.
He stood in the doorway, immobilized for a time by the sight of it. The family pile, packed away all these years. Blasted loose by that explosion in the parlor yesterday evening?