Other Works by Carolyn Osborn
A Horse of Another Color
The Fields of Memory
The Grands
Warriors & Maidens
Uncertain Ground
Contrary People
Where We Are Now © 2014
by Carolyn Osborn
Cover photograph: photographer unknown.
ISBN: 978-1-60940-387-4 (paperback original)
E-books:
ePub: 978-1-60940-388-1
Mobipocket/Kindle: 978-1-60940-389-8
Library PDF: 978-1-60940-390-4
Wings Press
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Cataloging In Publication:
Osborn, Carolyn, 1934-
[Short stories. Selections]
Where we are now / Carolyn Osborn.
pages cm.
ISBN 978-1-60940-387-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-388-1
(epub ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-389-8 (kindle-mobipocket ebook) --
ISBN (invalid) 978-1-60940-390-4 (library pdf ebook)
1. Short stories. I. Title.
PS3565.S348W44 2014
813’.54--dc23
2013045140
The stories in this book appeared originally, some in slightly different form, in the following magazines: “The Greats,” “The Weak Sister,” and “Where We Are Now,” in Antioch Review; “Numbers,” in Descant; “The Grands,” in Wind and Prize Stories 1990, The O. Henry Awards; “A Ladies Man,”in Numen 1; “Martin Moore McNeil,” in South Dakota Review; “The Shape of the World” in Texas Short Stories 2; “First Wife” in Witness; “The Themes of Country Western Music” in Southwest Review, “The Zanies” in The Texas Review; and “My Kate,” in Connecticut Review.
For Joe Osborn,
as always.
CONTENTS
The Greats
Numbers
Blue Skies
The Grands
A Ladies’ Man
Martin Moore McNeil
The Shape of the World
First Wife
Themes of Country Western Music
The Zanies
My Kate
The Weak Sister
Where We Are Now
Acknowledgments
About the Author
THE GREATS
In my mother’s family Great Uncle Ambrose is known as “the one who painted the fence blue.” He did it when he was drunk, and everyone else had gone to town one remote Saturday in the early 1930s. The fence was a typical Middle Tennessee white post-and-rail arrangement surrounding five acres of the farm’s front lawn, a small pasture for children, Shetland ponies, dogs, trees and swings. No one knew why Uncle Ambrose was drunk. He was a visitor from Charleston. Perhaps he brought some sorrow with him, or some sudden joy demanded celebration. But why did he choose to paint the fence?
My grandfather, I was told, said, “By God, Ambrose, I wish you’d taken on the barn. It needed painting.” (He didn’t have much leeway for comment since he got drunk and did strange things himself.)
No one could tell me if Great Uncle Ambrose finished the job. When I was six, ten years or so after the deed was done, I used to get stuck on a mean-tempered Shetland who preferred grazing a corner of the lawn to trotting children about. When I wasn’t bawling for someone to come and lead the pony away—quite logically I feared he’d bite me as he’d bitten one of my cousins already—I was looking for splinters of blue underneath the white rails. Other coats of paint and weather had washed it all off. Though I inquired, no one could explain Great Uncle Ambrose’s choice of color, nor could they remember why there were buckets of blue paint at the farm.
Grandpa Moore was a neat farmer. His place looked like the pictures in my first grade reader, or rather some of the outbuildings did. There was a log smokehouse, a red barn for livestock, a gray weathered wood house where “the help” lived and a gray tobacco barn. The house was rose-red brick, two-story, ante-bellum—too southern for Dick and Jane. All was kept in good order though Grandfather collected things. Any number of half-filled buckets of paint were stored in the livestock barn along with a dilapidated buggy, old mule collars, singletrees, other bits of harness and machinery. Ambrose might have wandered in there in the midst of a drunken reverie and picked up the first bucket of paint available.
However the fence painting happened, Moore family mythology, which concentrates on deeds and neglects motivations, prevents further inquiry. And Great Uncle Ambrose, himself, returned to Charleston where he died before I was old enough to ask the right questions.
Great Aunt Eula is “the one who went to California to buy movie houses.” This was sometime before 1927 when The Jazz Singer signaled the beginning of “talkies.” Whatever possessed her? She was a middle-aged woman, married to an indulgent man. My grandmother said, “Maybe she was tired of playing lady up there in Kentucky.” (Her guess was reliable as any since she played lady emphatically herself.) Great Aunt Eula was also the only one of the Moores who knew anything about family history. Except for their own memories, none of them were in the least interested in genealogy. “Eula knows all that,” they would say. After a short visit to Tennessee the family chronicler arrived in Los Angeles where she did indeed buy a movie house, for she wrote to my grandparents offering them free passes to all the shows if they would only come out.
My grandfather scorned the idea as “one of Eula’s notions” though Grandmother Moore wanted to go, a desire that categorized her as being as great a daydreamer as Eula. California was a good place for her, but no one else was supposed fall under her spell. Grandmother Moore did allow my mother to answer Eula’s summons. “Come on out and I’ll get you in the movies,” she said. Mother went to L.A., was photographed intensively by a friend of Eula’s and came home after a month without even seeing a movie. Years later she said, “There was never time. We always had to rush off to meet someone or other who made a lot of promises.” The statement was made without rancor. Apparently she’d had a good time and she’d never believed Aunt Eula’s expectations could turn her into an actress.
“You know Eula. She had to have her way.” So say present-day survivors. She was, according to them, headstrong and inclined to overreach herself in business matters. When she was quite old one of her nephews had to rescue her. He found her sitting on a sofa surrounded by the rest of her furniture in the yard of a house she was renting. She refused to use the word “evicted” to describe her problem. “Temporarily low on funds,” she explained. She died in California, and as far as I can find out, no one in the family ever entered one of her movie houses, if, indeed, she ever bought more than one.
I don’t think they were particularly angry at her. Great Aunt Eula simply left their sphere. My grandfather owned land, real estate in town, mules, horses, hogs. A woman who wanted to buy movie houses was, in all senses of the term, “outlandish” even though she was his sister.
She was gone before I ever got to California, but I like to think of her sitting in a darkened movie house in Los Angeles watching Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Theda Bara, Rudolph Valentino, and all the rest. And I also like to believe she enjoyed seeing The Mark of Zorro and The Three Musketeers a whole lot more than she liked icing tea cakes and collecting dates for the Moore family tree, especially since they disdained her efforts.
Great Aunt Eula and Great Uncle Ambrose vanished. Great Uncle Howard, who ventured out of the mountains of East Tennessee, is peculiarly still
with us. He was visiting my grandfather and died “of a fever” while staying at the farm. As children my cousins and I used to try to guess which of the house’s four bedrooms he died in and what fever he died of. Was it typhoid, poliomyelitis, meningitis? No one could tell us. “People died of fevers back then,” said my grandmother, exasperated by such scientific research. (Self-interest was involved. We were all terrified of polio and wanted to keep away from dormant germs.) Neither could anyone tell us exactly where Great Uncle Howard was buried. “Somewhere in the family plot,” they all said. The family plot has a general tombstone proclaiming MOORE; however, again for reasons no one can explain, he has no private stone, so when anyone dies Uncle Howard is “the one who has to be found.” Some cemetery worker must probe the ground with a rod until Uncle Howard’s casket is located. Why wouldn’t my grandfather buy his brother a tombstone? Did he dislike him? Was he hiding him from the law? Or was the tombstone merely one of those details Grandpa didn’t get around to taking care of before his own early death?
I thought once to ask for contributions for Uncle Howard’s stone, but I realized that the family preferred to let him stay as he is. Finding Uncle Howard is a welcome distraction when somebody else dies. And it is a ritual.
Though careless of ancestry, the Moores accept him as they do the other greats, their eccentric, willful, and finally, mysterious kin.
NUMBERS
Edgar has died. Kate’s letter came yesterday. He’ll be buried by now. We were never close, but I’ll miss him being in the world. I’ve kept Kate’s secret all this time. Poor Kate. Edgar left her too much alone. She was so young. How old? Twenty-one, not that young after all. Young in worldliness though. She hadn’t much family, only her parents, and the one brother who ran off somewhere. She left Virginia for the first time to marry. She and Edgar hadn’t been married but six months when he had to leave home for that short trip. Edgar was so much older than Kate, nine almost ten years. He should have known. He was a man of true imagination. When our brother Richard went to the pen, Edgar imagined him nearly out of the family, told Kate, told people around Franklin his own brother was distant kin, made him out to be a third cousin. Edgar didn’t know the least thing about tables of kinship, first cousins twice removed or any of that. He had to ask me how we were related to people. Generally he didn’t ask.
He got little Howie, the only one of us left at home, to come down from Kentucky and stay with Kate while he went to see Richard in jail. Rich was stuck in the habit of making moonshine, kept on making it till it went out of fashion. He needed to see Edgar. Said he wanted to straighten some things out. I don’t know what. His life was about as ordered as it ever was going to be in the penitentiary. He needed no one—never did. I know. I grew up under him. Sis, he and Edgar called me. Could have called me anything. Blood kin and could of been called Sal or Sary. They didn’t care about a girl, the only girl in the family. Edgar cared, pitied Rich in jail with a broken arm. Broke it in a jail fight.
So Edgar called on young Howie to come keep Kate company. She didn’t want to stay out there by herself. She was raised in a place about the size of Franklin, the town of Lexington in Virginia where Stonewall Jackson used to live. Country scared her. Too open. Kate wanted people around, the sounds and sights of others living. She liked the sounds of doorbells and conversations, not the wind sighing or a hen cackling. Howie rode Pa’s old gelding to the train station, I bet. Took off. Crops were in. Fields fallow. Winter still. Spring would appear all of a sudden. Howie got on the train to Franklin, and Kate met him there. Edgar was already gone, left the day before. Maybe it would have been different if he’d stayed home till Howie got there at least. He could of seen them together then, seen the married look on their faces.
Instead there was Kate alone waiting half-hidden in a buggy. I guess he knew it was her by the rig, by the horses. Edgar would have told him. Like him—to tell all about the matched pair of chestnuts and the hooded buggy and say only that Kate would be waiting. Probably he forgot that Howie was twenty-one himself, never pausing to consider his little brother was bound to have grown some in the years he’d been absent. Grown to manhood with a man’s needs. It was so simple, so foolish. Richard insisting he had to have Edgar visit, Edgar obeying—he always did whatever Richard wanted. Then Edgar turned around and insisted, and Howie obeyed, came to stay with Kate while his brother went off leaving them together out in the country five or six miles away from town, away from people. Kate had an aunt in Franklin. Why didn’t she stay with her? Was she away? I don’t know. Too much I don’t know. Oh, I guess it could have happened in town next door to the preacher. Who knows what goes on inside of houses?
I see Kate’s face now half-turned away from me, her long curly hair a curtain between us while we sat on the back porch steps whispering. Innocents! We were two innocents! And me waiting to hear the rest of it because she had to tell someone, some other woman, and I loved Howie. Or maybe I was the one to come along just then. Pa wouldn’t come, not for a funeral even. Spring showed up. Planting time. The ground, his ground, commanded him. That was the way he was, born in the mountains. They held him and others like him. Boys left from mountain farms leading a cow behind them when they went to sign up for the war. Their people lived so far removed they didn’t know milk came in bottles. Pa didn’t send me. I had already left, married Daniel and left when I was fifteen. Except to go to school, Pa wouldn’t let me out of the kitchen. Ma wasn’t alive to help me. There was no other way to go save on the arm of a man, or on the back of some man’s horse, told Pa I was going to the spring, met Dan there, left home riding behind him barefoot as a Indian. He bought me a pair of shoes. We married when I was a child myself, fifteen, five years before Edgar did. Dan and I were traveling to California, coming out to make our way in the west when we got word of Howie. I had to go by way of Tennessee. I had to, Dan agreed. Mama died when I was thirteen and left me with a household full of bossy men. I found an agreeable one to marry.
Richard, Edgar, Ambrose, Howie and me. Five of us. Ambrose ran off to Charleston, left a note, said they had better pianos there. Howie and I were raised together. He was the only one who wanted to stay at home to help Pa. Edgar was musical like Ambrose except he knew the fiddle, learned it from Pa, but he was more interested in making money, so he left for better farming country in Tennessee. Richard made moonshine, made foolishness walking, made himself a jail sentence.
Listen, Kate said. Oh, Eula. Tell me, did I kill him? I loved him. I couldn’t help loving him. I couldn’t stop, then Mr. Moore came home, and I had to stop. I hadn’t wanted him to leave, begged him not to go away, but he said he had to, had to go see Richard. He’s been in trouble all his life, hasn’t he? She cocked her head, pushed her hair back a little, so I could tell someone else’s trouble, Richard’s even, was a relief to her. Yes, I told her, trouble seemed to come natural to Richard. Pa said he went bad early. He wouldn’t learn a dandelion from a tobacco plant, said he’d never have to hoe that way.
I knew it was wrong, Eula. We both knew. We couldn’t help ourselves.
Did Edgar?
I told you. We had to stop when he came home. I am not a wanton.
But did he know?
Maybe. I don’t know. I didn’t tell him. Neither did Howie. When he was around me and Mr. Moore, I acted as if I didn’t much care for him.
Why, I had to ask her. Why didn’t Howie leave?
He did. The day after Mr. Moore came home. He left early the next morning. He was going to Franklin to catch the train there. Mr. Moore was out in the fields somewhere. Howie borrowed one of the horses, I watched him saddle. He was white in the face and his hands were shaking. We were both shaking trying not to touch each other. Made the horse skittish. Howie planned to stable it in town. I was supposed to pass that on. We looked each other in the eye, then he rode off. The horse brought him home. He fell off back here. I didn’t know. She pointed out in the yard. Near the faucet. Mr. Moore found him when he came. I was inside all
the time, in the bedroom crying because Howie was gone, and he was out here I don’t know how long. I must have killed him. I let him lay out there on the ground.
She put her head down on her lap.
Kate, don’t. I told her. He was probably sick way before he left.
He should of stayed. I could have looked after him. He wouldn’t stay in the house with me and his brother. Incestuous. That’s what he said.
Well, it wasn’t. That’s what Cain and Abel were doing with their sisters. And King David’s son Amon did with his sister Tamar. Don’t you remember all that trouble that began with David and Bathsheba? Don’t you know your Bible? I started to say and didn’t because I remembered the laws set down in Leviticus. Anyway it was Howie that had been talking about incest, not Kate. She knew the word was adultery. Howie did too. They didn’t want to say it.
There was a tree blooming there by the back steps, a fruit tree, a pear, I think, the way its branches stood up, not bent like a peach, but a pear holding all its white blossoms up and bees already around. Was that what made me think? Was that what gave me the idea? “Be fruitful and multiply.”
Was that God speaking to Cain and Abel, or to their wives? I’ve forgotten my own Bible. Ben-Hur sent everyone scampering after theirs because they wanted to check on General Lew Wallace. I put both the novel and the Bible in the lobby of our theater when we showed it. Somebody stole the Bible. Dan laughed, said maybe it would do them some good.
The March wind blew white pear blossoms over our heads, Kate’s and mine. A petal landed in her dark hair. She shook it out. You know the rest, she said.
No, well maybe I do. But tell me. Mourners need to talk, to repeat until the very thing they don’t want to know becomes real to them.
Edgar and the hired man brought him in.
That’s the only time I ever heard her say Edgar’s name. She was too proper generally. Had to call him Mr. Moore no matter if she was talking to his own sister. But this one time, when he was carrying Howie in his house, when his arms were around his younger brother, she said Edgar. He laid him in the guest room bed, and he died of a fever two weeks later. Kate thought he died of love. I used to think she was too proud, too eager to prove her own family belonged to the gentry. That was all she had, her pride, her own idea of respectability. She gave it up to speak of my brother Howie to me.
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