She settled back in the chair. “When I think of how so many people suffered.” Her voice grew softer and she felt tired again. Across from her, Preston sat still, listening. She’d never really talked to him about what had transpired at college that fall, or how she’d learned of Tripp’s death. They’d skimmed over the details, as they had once skimmed over the murky waters of the creek in a kayak.
Now, she told herself. It’s time to tell him now.
“It was unusually cool that fall,” she began. “I was back at Converse College and Adele was my roommate again. The first few days living together were difficult, as you can imagine after all that happened that summer, but we tried to mend things between us enough so we could get along. We scarcely saw each other. She was always energetic and busy. And frankly, I was so caught up in my own worries at the time, I didn’t mind that we weren’t as close as we once were. It might have even made things easier, considering I was secretly pregnant with her brother’s child.
“I used to take long walks in the parks that surrounded the college. I remember the gold and scarlet leaves were especially bright that fall. I’d been at college for almost three months, and it had been at least ten days since I’d written Tripp about the baby. I waited by the phone in the dorm’s hall every night, pacing, biting my nails. I tried to be patient and allow time for the mail to be delivered. Then after a few more days, I convinced myself that the letter sat on the table in the foyer of Sweetgrass, waiting for Tripp to stop by the house and pick up his mail. Or perhaps for you to be sent out to Bluff House to deliver it. But more days passed and still no phone call or letter came.
“Then one afternoon I came back to the dorm from my walk. I remember it was midafternoon and I’d gotten over-heated and sweaty. The baby might’ve been no bigger than a pea in a pod, but he made his presence known. I climbed the stairs, and when I paused on the landing to catch my breath, I heard the muffled sound of crying. I suddenly became aware that the hall was unusually quiet. This was the busiest, noisiest time of the day, when the girls came rushing back from their classes and got ready for the evening. The silence was eerie. Wrong.
“I knew that something bad had happened, I sensed that somehow I was in danger. I was walking down the hall toward my room. Some of the other girls’ rooms were open. I saw them huddled together, talking in hushed voices. They stopped talking and looked up when I passed by.
“My door was closed, but from behind it I could hear the sound of heart-wrenching sobs. I opened the door and there was Adele, lying facedown on her bed, sobbing piteously on her pillow. She had a telegram crumpled in her hand.”
Mama June closed her eyes and brought to mind that afternoon in searing clarity.
“Adele,” she said softly, approaching her with the same caution she might a wounded animal. “Adele, it’s me. Mary June. Sugar, what’s happened?”
Adele swiftly turned her head, her shoulders tense. Her eyes were swollen and smeared with mascara, forming a horrid mask of grief. She stared wildly at her for a moment, then focusing, she collapsed back on the bed.
“He’s dead!” she cried out.
Mary June’s mouth slipped open as she felt a rising sense of panic.
“Who?” she asked through dry lips, though in her heart she knew.
“Tripp. He’s dead, Mary June! Here,” she cried, thrusting the telegram at her.
Mary June stumbled back to her bed. Her mouth gasped for air that wouldn’t fill her lungs as a roaring sound, like the ocean during a storm, filled her head.
Denial was immediate. “No, he’s not!” she screamed back.
Adele choked back her tears. “Yes, he is. Read the telegram!”
Mary June looked at Adele with disbelieving eyes and then at the slip of paper she held crumpled in her hand. She did not want to touch it, to read it, to make it real.
Adele thrust the telegram toward her again, urging her to take it.
Reluctantly Mary June took hold of the crumpled yellow paper. She smoothed out the wrinkled telegram on her lap with trembling fingers and stared at it.
So few words for such an enormous message, she thought with an absurd calm. She read the words, then folded the paper, carefully pressing the creases as if by prolonging the process, she could cling longer to a thread of hope. When she could speak, she handed the telegram back to Adele.
“It doesn’t say he’s…he’s dead.”
Adele sniffed loudly and rose to sit. She grabbed a tissue from the desk and then released a great, shuddering sigh. She spoke in ragged sentences.
“I called home. I talked to Daddy. He told me.”
He told me. He’s dead.
Tripp was always so alive…. She felt suddenly cold and longed to climb under the covers of her bed and curl up, to bury her face in her pillow. Her mind darted to waking up at Bluff House in Tripp’s bed, his arms around her as they lay like spoons. She’d felt so warm then.
“Mary June, do you hear me?” Adele shook her shoulders. “Mary June?”
She blinked, feeling as if she’d just been shaken awake. “I hear you.”
“You scared me, sitting like that for so long.”
Mary June shook her head, trying to clear it. She felt the storm still coming. “It can’t be true,” she told Adele with a stupor. “It’s a mistake.”
“It’s no mistake! Mama can’t talk to anyone,” Adele went on, dabbing at her eyes. “Daddy says the doctor’s given her something to calm down. And Preston…”
Mary June swung her head around, her chest tightening. “What about Preston?”
“Daddy says Preston and Tripp had a terrible fight over at Blakely’s Bluff. It was a brawl like never before. They really tore the place up. Press came home bloodied. Mama about died on the spot. But when Daddy went to Blakely’s Bluff to lay down the law, Tripp was good and drunk and wouldn’t listen. He took the boat out. Daddy couldn’t stop him. That’s why he had the accident. He’d been drinking. And it was dark. Otherwise he never would have hit that oyster bed.”
“Oh, God…” Mary June buried her face in her palms as a wave of despair swept over her. She was devastated yet, strangely, tears would not come. Perhaps because in her mind she’d already faced that he’d left her. Or perhaps she’d already cried so many tears, there just weren’t any left. She wished she could cry, loudly and violently. It would be so much better than the cold numbness that spread through her veins as though she, herself, were dead as well.
Adele began shredding the tissue into little jagged strips. Gentle knocks on the door and the worried inquiries of the other girls went ignored. After a while the knocks ceased and the girls went to the dining hall.
Adele stilled her hands in her lap and fixed her gaze on Mary June.
“The only part I can’t figure out,” she said in a strained voice, “is what made Tripp and Press fight like that. Daddy said they were like to kill each other. Sure, they fought before, but never like that. Do you know why they’d fight like that?” Her tone was prodding, even accusing.
Mary June lay down on her bed, bringing her knees close to her chest, and knotted the end of her pillow in her fists. She knew, instinctively, that she had been the reason the brothers had fought so bitterly. She knew Adele had to suspect this as well. Yet neither of them could dare give it voice.
Hadn’t Adele warned Mary June about Preston’s feelings? She’d told Mary June not to date Tripp. She’d been dead set against it. They’d had words about it. But Preston had never declared himself, and despite his feelings for her, she knew that reason alone wouldn’t have caused a fight like this. No, she thought with a shudder. She could only think of one thing that could. She turned her face into her pillow.
“The afternoon that we found out Tripp had died in the boating accident,” Mama June told Preston, “we both cried and cried. It was so sad. Such a waste! Adele told me that you’d fought with Tripp and she’d wanted to know if I knew why. I suspected then that she knew about the baby. We were roommates, afte
r all. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, watching me, waiting, I think, for me to tell her.
“I wanted to tell her. Oh, Preston, I wanted to tell someone about the baby! I was so afraid and lonely. I needed to vent with my friend, my roommate, Tripp’s sister. My chest felt ready to burst with pain and secrets. But I thought, what good would it do to tell Adele about the baby now? Tripp was dead. I’d only just learned that and I needed time to figure things out. I was afraid Adele would be furious with me for being so stupid or for somehow besmirching her brother’s memory with a scandal. I knew she’d end up making me feel worse. Adele’s fury can be cruel. I couldn’t handle a direct confrontation just then, and in the end I knew it would solve nothing.
“The shame was mine to bear alone. I’d brought it on myself. If I told Adele the truth about the baby and it became public, the shame and dishonor would carry over to Tripp and your whole family. I felt the least I could do was spare you that.”
Preston squeezed her hand and she felt the power of his consolation.
“You know the rest.” Mama June wiped away a tear that coursed a trail down her cheek. “What’s done is done.”
Mama June knew that with that decision made so many years ago, made with all good intentions, Mary June Clark had begun weaving the elaborate web of lies and silences that would bind her in the silken threads of deception for years to come.
That night, Mama June stood at her bedroom window and stared out at Blakely’s Bluff. The clouds had rolled in, obscuring the moon and blanketing the sky in inky blackness.
She stood staring until her body grew heavy with fatigue and her lids drooped, eager to close. Reluctantly she climbed into her bed, turned off the light on her bedside bureau, then brought the sheets and thin summer coverlet over her shoulders. They were cool, as was the pillow. Laying her head down, she caught the refreshing scent of sage that Kristina had sprinkled on her linen to soothe her sleep.
Mama June lay on the cool sheets in the deep darkness and closed her eyes. She would sleep now, she knew. Her journey was nearing its end, but was not over yet.
Mary June Clark drove from college back to Mount Pleasant with Adele for Tripp’s funeral. It was so unlike their first journey together the May before. Then the highways had been lined with the spring green of promise. Now the earth was dressed for sorrow in muted colors of gold, rust and the dying brown of fragile, crumbling leaves that littered the roadside. They spoke very little. Music blared mercifully from the speaker, allowing them consolation in their own private thoughts. The trip to the coast was the first leg of their separation, though neither of them realized it at the time.
Blame and guilt sat side by side, stoic and silent, each bound by a loyalty that, rather than unite them as it should have, divided the two as cleanly as the yellow line that coursed through the hard cement of the highway home.
Christ Church was filled with mourners that overflowed the small stone house of worship and onto the green grass that surrounded it. A tragedy, especially one to a family as beloved and respected as the Blakelys, is felt by a community. Yet when the victim is one as striking and young as Hamlin Blakely III, the outpouring of grief is like the bursting of a dam.
The Blakely family had ties that traveled back to the early days of historical Charleston, and to a one, the complex, extended branches of the family tree gathered at the family seat to mourn the loss of this favorite son. Several Episcopal priests presided over the mass, one of them an uncle. Even the bishop participated.
Mary June remained in the background, as was fitting the occasion and her position. She was neither Tripp’s widow nor his fiancée. Indeed, no one outside the immediate family even knew of their whirlwind affair. It was better this way, she thought, sitting in the back pew between two strangers, one of whom wept piteously during the sermon. In contrast, Mary June sat erect and dry-eyed, with her hands clasped over her belly.
After the service, guests were invited back to Sweetgrass for a grand luncheon in the Southern tradition. The comfort food of fried chicken, barbecue, slow-cooked greens, corn bread, biscuits and banana pudding helped to sustain the family and friends through their grief.
Mary June drifted away from the clusters of people toward the creek, to a wooden swing that hung from long, blackened ropes tied to an enormous, ancient live oak. The cragged branch arched over the glassy waters of the creek like an arthritic finger. During the past summer that seemed a lifetime ago, Mary June and Adele had sat squished together on the rough-hewn wooden seat like peas in a pod, their legs synchronized as they pumped, laughing and talking, one hand holding a side of the rope, the other wrapped around her friend’s waist.
She sat alone on the seat now and rocked aimlessly. Her gaze followed the direction that the branch pointed to like some wizened old crone foretelling her future, for it directed her gaze to the creek that had claimed Tripp’s life.
She stared out to sea while the family ate and reminisced. Some time later, she heard the crunch of a footfall behind her. Soon after, she felt the presence of someone at her side. Reluctantly she turned her head and lifted her gaze.
She hadn’t spoken to Preston since she’d arrived the day before, though she’d seen him, of course. He was a pallbearer and spoke eloquently at the funeral. She thought he looked haggard though composed. Like most of the gentlemen, he’d removed his dark jacket and tie and rolled up his sleeves in the heat of the Indian summer day. He looked older, too, she thought, noting the crow’s feet that cut into his deeply tanned face. There was something else changed that she couldn’t put a word to. It was as if someone had snuffed out the incandescent spark of boyish innocence and youthful hope that once shone in his eyes. Death had stolen that from him, and she felt certain her own eyes were as smoky with grief.
“How are you?” he asked.
“Fine,” she replied.
He looked at his polished black shoes as though he could read something in them, and asked, “I mean, really. How are you?”
Mary June looked at him more carefully, trying to read any innuendo in his tone.
“I’m fine,” she replied, more emphatically.
Preston sighed and looked out into the creek. He had a strong profile, thinner, more defined than Tripp’s had been. She saw a muscle twitch in his cheek and her hand tightened around the swing’s rope.
“We have to talk,” he said.
“About what?” Anxious, she kicked off from the ground, gaining some swing.
He reached out to still the swing. When she turned her head, they locked gazes.
“I know about the baby,” he began.
Mary June’s eyes widened. Her first reaction was to deny it. Then the shock of hearing the words the baby spoken reverberated through her, shaking her loose. The tears swelled in her eyes as she stared in disbelief. She’d held her emotions in check, yet she couldn’t be strong a moment longer. She collapsed in his arms, weeping.
“Don’t cry, Mary June. He loved you,” he said earnestly, holding her tight. “I know he did. He loved you and would have married you. He’d have been a good husband to you and a good father to your baby. You have to believe me.”
“He told you.” It was more a confirmation than a question.
“Not outright. I found out on my own.”
She hadn’t thought of this. She felt an enormous relief to be able to talk to someone about the great secret she was holding inside of her. That it was Preston, someone she could trust, gave her strength.
“How?” she asked, needing to know.
“Your letter.” When she startled, he went on quickly. “I went out to Blakely’s Bluff for one reason or another, I can’t even recall now. Tripp was out so I waited. The house was a mess. I mean, worse than usual. There were empty beer bottles everywhere and ashtrays filled with cigarette butts. The whole place reeked of a seedy bar. I was pretty damn disgusted with him, I can tell you. He was letting himself go. It was just such a waste.”
He ran his hand through his hair,
rubbing the back of his neck with an old man’s weariness.
“So I started cleaning up,” he said. “I just grabbed the trash can and commenced dumping garbage off from every surface. When I got to the table, there were all these papers spread across it. I was careful. I don’t know if he told you, but he was writing a novel.”
She realized it was just one more part of Tripp she was unaware of. “No.”
“I just threw away those papers that were crumpled in a ball. I was sifting through the rest when I noticed some pink stationery. And I recognized your handwriting.”
Mary June put her hand over her lips. “You read them?”
“No. Tripp came back and saw your letter in my hand. He was madder than hell and didn’t believe me when I told him I hadn’t read it. He started yelling and it just came out. Then I got mad that he got you…that he wasn’t careful. I mean—” His face colored and he blurted out, “Hell, Mary June. Tripp was a lot older than you. He’s had a lot of experience. He should’ve known better than to take advantage of a girl like you.”
“Oh, Press, it wasn’t like that. He didn’t—”
“He did,” he interrupted angrily. “There are things a guy can do—should do—to keep a girl from getting pregnant, Mary June.”
She took a shuddering breath, exhaling slowly. It was too late to cast blame. It takes two to tango, as her mother would say.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a packet of letters tied together with string. She recognized them as her own.
“I thought you’d want these back,” he said, placing the letters in her hand. “I didn’t want anyone else to see them and I couldn’t just throw them out. They belong to you.”
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