Poor Paul (not that I really feel sorry for him; I wouldn’t have cared if they had lit the newspapers) gets into all kind of trouble. He hid under the pastry table once and when my mother walked away from the beautiful wedding cake she was icing, Paul reached up and just grabbed a chunk of cake in his fist. You can imagine. Once, his mother tied him to a chair to keep him out of trouble and he picked the stitching from his brand new shoes until they fell apart. It’s not a good idea to leave his hands free, I told her.
You could say that Paul is the very opposite of a Do-X-machine. Things could be running smoothly until Paul comes on the scene, and then it all would go straight to hell.
I often come to the “cocktail garden” and swing on the big swing between two huge trees. It used to be exclusive, used only by the “in-crowd,” meaning anyone with a bottle of gin. There used to be a white metal table with a big umbrella in the center and some white metal chairs. People also sat on the two green benches. It’s really an elegant place to come and have cocktails in, and when the in-crowd came here, they were always dressed to the hilt in high heels or dark blazers. But like a lot of other things, it’s no longer used. I don’t know why; I think it’s sad. Once it was on my list of Sorrowful Places, but something else more sorrowful beat it out. But you can’t tell; it might be back on the list sometime.
I only wish it were harder for me to find Sorrowful Places.
10
Moses in the bullrushes
This bothered me a lot, and I thought about it for the two-mile walk into La Porte. I meant to go to the Rainbow Café, but as I was crossing the street near St. Michael’s, I decided to go in and sit down.
I’m no church-goer; none of the family is, though my mother and Lola Davidow claim to be Episcopalians. I like St. Michael’s because of all of its stained-glass windows and sculptures. Mostly, though, I think I just like to hang around and talk to Father Freeman, who is high up on my list of adults who don’t talk down to children. Also, he’s good-looking, very dark and elegant, although not as good-looking as the Sheriff.
Of course, Father Freeman wasn’t around forty years ago, but I think he would still be interested in what I had to say about Mary-Evelyn. Probably, he’d at least have heard about the Devereaus and the old Devereau place, and certainly he knows about the shooting over at White’s Bridge. I wonder with a kind of fearfulness if I’m the only person who thinks all of this is related. Does that make me more responsible for what might happen?
St. Michael’s always strikes me as cool and dark and warm and light at the same time. This has to do with its silence and its windows and the way rays of sun weave color across the floor and the pews. I always stay on my feet and walk around and look at the windows. Even if I’m tired I try not to sit in a pew in case someone might think I’m praying.
Just as I knew he would, after ten or fifteen minutes, Father Freeman came out of one of the little doors near the altar, saw me, and smiled. He joined me in looking at one of the windows. We were pretty quiet. He is one of those people who don’t have to be always talking and who are comfortable being around in silence.
I asked him if he was familiar with the case of Mary-Evelyn Devereau, and he said yes, a little. I told him all I knew, the details I’d written in my notebook, but not, of course, about Ben Queen. I did consider it for a moment; priests and lawyers cannot tell what you’ve told them. They are bound not to.
We fell silent again. And then he said, “That’s one of the saddest stories I’ve ever heard.” Sadly, he shook his head. “A little girl rowing herself out on a lake and drowning that way. Why do you think she did it?”
“They said it was an accident.”
“Yes, but it was no accident, surely, that she was in the boat in the first place.”
It was such a relief to have someone take my side in this. “I know. I’ve been trying to work it out. There are too many questions left unanswered. It doesn’t make any sense the way it happened—” I felt myself rushing headlong into speech, the words tripping over one another. I was breathless.
“You’ve given this a lot of thought.”
I nodded but kept looking up at the stained-glass window.
“Moses,” he said.
“Huh?”
“The bullrushes,” he said. “You know, when he was a baby.”
I have hardly any acquaintance with the Bible, but I mumbled, yes, I knew. Which I didn’t. All I knew about Moses was the Red Sea.
“To save him, his mother wrapped him in rushes and then put him in a little boat.”
Then he fell silent again and seemed to be in a brown study (a phrase I adored, Maud Chadwick having told me what it meant) over Moses. I didn’t see really any similarity between Moses and Mary-Evelyn. It sort of irritated me he had to bring Moses into it. I said, “Well, but Moses got over it and came back and parted the Red Sea.” I hoped Father Freeman was impressed with my grasp of Moses’s life.
He nodded, and said, “I didn’t mean they were literally alike.”
“I guess not.” I said with real authority, although I didn’t know what he meant.
I determined then to look up the story of Moses, but I didn’t have time to go to the library now, and I’d have to allow myself some time after I got back to the hotel to talk to Aurora Paradise before dinner. Also, I wanted to stop at the Rainbow.
The Rainbow Café is owned by a bossy woman named Shirley. We call her Shirl. Like Lola Davidow, she is always complaining about her customers. Ordinarily, it’s the customer who gets to complain about the management (the rude help, the cold room, the mile-long walk to the bathroom); for the Hotel Paradise and the Rainbow Café, it’s the other way around. Shirl and Lola complain about the customers, as often as not to their faces. Once people get used to it, they don’t pay any attention.
Shirl sits on a high stool behind the cash register, smoking and barking commands and selling her Heavenly Pie, which is an imitation of my mother’s Angel Pie, the one with the meringue crust. Angel Pie is one of the hotel specialties—I guess Aurora would say its “signature pie.” For Shirl, my mother threw in a couple of her extra ingredients, in this case a quarter teaspoon of cayenne pepper for the meringue crust and a tablespoon of mayonnaise (“Be sure it’s Hellmann’s”) for the lemon chiffon filling. Who would be nitwit enough to believe this? you might ask. But you don’t know my mother. She can lock eyes with you as if she’s got a pistol at her temple and lie. Then you might say this is not a trait to want to imitate, but, again, you’ve never seen my mother do it. It’s really not so much lying as acting. My mother has a great flair for it (and used to do it when she was young and put on amateur theatricals here at the Hotel Paradise), and she can change selves and accents like Lola Davidow can change martinis for mint juleps. I’ve heard my mother, among a group of guests from the Deep South, slather on the accent of the most solid Georgia peach-picker that ever lived.
This must be where my brother gets it; his dramatic flair, his ability to stare you down and lie—this must come from my mother.
So Shirl sits in the Rainbow smoking and complaining, her elbows on the glass case in which are housed her Heavenly Pies that no one buys twice. Her cakes and doughnuts, though, are quite popular.
One of the waitresses is Charlene, a pasty-faced girl whose big bust greets you before her eyes do and who’s always getting pinched on the behind. The other waitress, one of my two all-time favorite people from anywhere, is Maud Chadwick. She’s kind of tall and pretty with silky light brown hair and the clearest face I’ve ever seen. You can read Maud in her face. I don’t know how old she is, maybe as old as thirty or thirty-five, I’d guess. But she has a way of sinking into herself and coming up seventeen, as if she’s got all of these past selves right inside that she can call up whenever she wants to. Maybe that’s why she seems to know how I feel: her twelve-year-old self is right there at her beck and call. It occurs to me that this is a real gift, almost to become the person you’re talking to. In a way, it’s my m
other’s ability to come on as a Southerner, except Maud isn’t acting; she just is.
Shirl has imposed a ton of rules, tacked up on little signs; one of these is stuck up on the high-backed mahogany booths in the rear of the room warning that booths can only be used by two or more people. But Maud always sees to it I get to sit in a booth; she takes a break when I come in and sits there with me, at least until I get what I’ve ordered. Once “ensconced” (which is how Maud describes it) with my Coke and bowl of chili, she can go back to waiting tables. “Squatter’s rights,” she calls it.
The thing is that a lot of the time the booths are completely empty, as the people who come to the Rainbow are mostly by themselves and are regulars who sit at the counter—a lot of them on exactly the same stools, same time every weekday. There’s Dodge Haines (who owns the Chevy dealership) and there’s Mayor Sims. These are the two biggest fanny-pinchers, which I think in the mayor is disgusting; he should be setting a good example. Then there’s Ubub and Ulub, the Wood boys, who do not seem to mind being called by the letters on their license plates. But then, the Wood boys have very even temperaments. I guess they’d have to, getting all the fun poked at them that they do, which I think is terrible.
Maud always waits on them because Charlene likes to make them order, just to hear them say things like “oat bee sanguid” for “roast beef sandwich.” But Maud tells them the special and all they have to do is nod or shake their heads, and then she tells them something else until they nod, Yes, I’ll have that.
One person who won’t put up with anybody heckling Ulub and Ubub is the La Porte Sheriff. If he hears Dodge Haines or Bud Hemple or one of the others giving the Woods a hard time, he’ll likely walk back out and put a ticket on the person’s car. He knows everyone’s vehicle and it’s not hard to find a reason for a ticket, considering most of them (especially the mayor) park without any attention to signs. They know why they’re getting a ticket, though, and when the Sheriff walks in, they shut up from teasing Ulub and Ubub and drink their coffee and talk about other things.
The Sheriff and Maud are good friends; you can sense their closeness even though he’s always teasing her and she’s always bickering with him. But still, you can tell. Maud’s divorced, but has a son named Chad who’s away at school. The Sheriff is married to a woman named Florence who I hardly ever see. I’ve heard my mother and Lola talking about her and how she goes with every man she sees. Poor Sam, they say and sigh.
If there’s one person I can’t imagine saying “poor Sam” about, it’s the Sheriff. More than that I can’t imagine any wife of his going with someone else. He’s very handsome and though he might be a shade under six feet, he looks over it. There is a tallness to him that can’t be measured in inches, and I don’t think it’s the holstered gun on his hip.
The Sheriff seems really glad to see me when I turn up, almost as if someone just shoved an unexpected present under his nose. For me, this is really something, as it is not a reaction I get from people most of the time. I have tried hard to live up to his idea of me. That I guess I failed is my biggest problem.
11
Moses and Aurora
Aurora Paradise is the only one I know who has a Bible. But, of course, she wouldn’t let me see it until I made her a Cold Comfort. She called it my “signature drink.” Not even Lola Davidow could make a Cold Comfort, for it took not only skill, but imagination. Well, imagination, anyway; skill didn’t come into it much. As long as I started with Southern Comfort (from the Davidow supply), I could toss in anything else—brandy, Jack Daniel’s, rye whiskey, crème de menthe—in addition to fruit juice. I perfected this concoction as I went along, adding an orange slice, a sprig of mint, or a cube of pineapple, and if I wanted her to really remember, to resurrect people and scenes from the past, I made a whole fruit kabob and tossed in more brandy. The Bible would not test my creativity in the drink department, as it made no demands on Aurora’s mind. Just to get a look in her Bible, a maraschino cherry on the ice cubes would do.
She sipped her Cold Comfort and smacked her lips and squinched her eyes shut. “Umm-hmm!” she said and sipped some more, first making bubbles by blowing in the straw (which is so childish I hardly ever do it anymore).
“My Bible? Now what do you want that for?” She rocked in a satisfied way, her fingers in their dressy little net gloves, plying the soda straw.
“None of—” I was about to say “none of your beeswax” but caught myself. For Aurora might just know the whole story of Moses. I really didn’t want to sift through all of those thin, tissue-y pages. Then I reminded myself that if Aurora Paradise didn’t lie outright (as she did about the rules of cards and the find-the-pea trick), she liked to slyly insert a piece of misinformation in an account, just to trip a person up. So I said, “I just want to read the Moses story.”
“Moses? You suddenly get religion, girl? You been over there to the camp meeting with the Holy Rollers again?”
I had gone there once with Will and Mill, who only attended to hear songs they could make up new words for. I ignored that question. Then she asked, “Do you even know which part Moses is in? Old Testament or New?”
It was fifty-fifty so I took a chance. “Old Testament.” As I’ve said, I’m on very shaky ground, Bible-wise. But she didn’t contradict, so I went on. “I mean, how many chapters into it is Moses when he gets put in the bullrushes?” I certainly did not want to read any more about Moses than I had to.
Aurora blew down her straw again, but there was little liquid left. “Well, you don’t have to read it. I can tell you the life of Moses.” She said this while cutting me a sly glance.
“No! I want to read it myself.”
She shrugged. “Please yourself, only you got to be careful. Some Bibles don’t get the story right.”
“What are you talking about? Bibles are Bibles, there’s neither wrong nor right ones!”
Elaborately, she placed her glass on the little table beside her rocking chair and fiddled with her net gloves. I just knew she was trying to fill me with doubts and put obstacles in my path. And I stood (I was never invited to sit down) wondering, what was the difference really between Aurora and someone like Ree-Jane? I answered myself. Easy. Ree-Jane has no imagination.
Aurora Paradise was much more like my mother giving out recipes with one wrong ingredient in them, like adding cold coffee grounds to the Chocolate Feather Cake. I think this is brilliant and very diplomatic. It makes her out to be generous and at the same time she holds onto her trade secrets.
“Yes, there are. Maybe I’d better tell you Moses’s story.”
“So which story would you tell me? The right or the wrong one?” I asked this in a put-on-sweet voice. When she cackled, I said, “For a woman ninety-one years old, you act really childish.”
“Seventy-nine!” she snapped. “Not a day over, Miss!”
“Oh, well, that explains everything.” I took the empty glass and left the room in what I thought was a grand fashion.
12
Falling out with the Sheriff
It wasn’t until several days after she was shot and killed that the police were able to identify Fern Queen. There was no identification on her, like a driver’s license. Finally, when Sheba and George Queen heard the description of the woman found shot over near White’s Bridge, they called the police.
Cold Flat Junction doesn’t have a police station or any “police presence” (as the Sheriff calls it), so the state troopers notified ours. Usually, the Sheriff is the one who goes when there’s trouble in Cold Flat Junction, and this sure looked like trouble.
I could have told the police who the dead woman was, only I didn’t. My trouble with the Sheriff started because I didn’t tell him. But more important, I didn’t tell him about Ben Queen. The police didn’t seem to care too much as to why he’d shoot his and Rose’s daughter. For if it wasn’t Ben Queen, who else would have done it? I got the impression they did not linger over this question.
The Sheriff
suspected I knew something; no, he knew I knew something when he sat down in my booth in the Rainbow and told me he was just back from Cold Flat Junction where he’d talked to Sheba and George Queen. They had told him, in passing, that Jen Graham’s girl (that’s me) had been to their house with an Elijah Root, who the Sheriff didn’t know and wondered how I did: I mean with Mr. Root being in his sixties, seventies, it was interesting that you’d be traveling around with him. The Sheriff could be sarcastic. As I’d seen the Sheriff every day since Fern Queen got shot, he wondered that I didn’t mention this visit of mine to the Queens and also what else my personal (and unauthorized, he said) investigation had turned up.
All I said was “Nothing,” which was hardly the gospel truth, seeing that it had turned up Ben Queen.
It was the night before I talked to the Sheriff in the Rainbow that Ben Queen had appeared at the Devereau house and been just as surprised to find me there as I was to find him. Because Rose had lived there, it didn’t seem strange to me that he’d turn up there if he were looking for someone. Did he tell me why he was there? Did I ask him? No, because I thought I knew. I knew he was just out of prison. And someone had shot his daughter. But I knew, after we talked, it wasn’t him.
We walked from the house to the spring, and that’s when we talked about scapegoats. There’s people put on this earth to take the blame for others. Mary-Evelyn was one, he said; she was the scapegoat for the whole family, the person upon whose head was heaped the sins and misfortunes of the others, of all the Devereaus. It was an accident, he said, an awful accident that had happened to that child.
I believed him then about Mary-Evelyn. But after I’d had time to think about it, I changed my mind. In a way, I would rather not think Mary-Evelyn was so miserable she’d take the chance she did. A blind chance. I hate to think her head was so crowded with remembering things the Devereau sisters had done to her and would keep on doing, that she was driven to escape. The idea that someone our age could find life so hard it drove her to go out on that lake in the middle of the night—well, it hardly bears thinking about.
Cold Flat Junction Page 6