by Janis Owens
Sam grunted and crushed his own cigarette and vowed to give them up, if for no other reason than so he wouldn’t have to hear any more of Wesley’s endless news flashes on Carl and the Hoyts. And Lea hated cigarettes anyway. She was always nagging him about smoking around the baby. She didn’t give a damn if he developed cancer of the face, but she did worry about the effect of secondhand smoke blowing in from the patio and choking their son. Nag number 1,059 in a marriage that had been reduced to two common goals, raising Brice and raising Brice, and came to its natural end seven months later in the most humiliating fashion, when Lea opted out of a dying relationship in the time-honored fashion by having an affair with a psychiatrist on staff at Three Rivers.
By the time Sam was served the official papers, she’d handed in her notice and packed her share of the dishes and even enrolled Brice in a prestigious preschool in Flagstaff, all part of a well-organized plan to follow her lover to a new job in Arizona. Though Sam’s marriage had never been a walk in the park, and he’d had cause to suspect another man was in the picture for a good many months, Sam was still shattered by the news, not as much by her betrayal as her casual brush-off, her notifying him after the fact. His colleagues and his brothers congratulated him on getting out of a marriage that had never worked, but to Sam, the guilt of the thing was unending.
For months, he wandered around their apartment in a haze of self-accusation, until Brice came home for his first summer visit and, Sam’s gnawing fears to the contrary, seemed a bright, well-adjusted kid, excited over his mother’s pregnancy, which would give him a much-wanted brother, whose image he’d already seen on a sonogram. Only then did Sam admit that, well, maybe their breakup hadn’t been all Lea’s fault. Maybe something was lacking in him, Sam Lense, and their debacle of a marriage had been a two-way street. Maybe even connected in some small way to the knowledge he’d never loved his wife one-tenth as much as he had Jolie Hoyt. Wasn’t that a joke, as he’d never made an effort to get in touch with her, though she only lived an hour away, down a wide stretch of interstate highway. Aside from Wes’s occasional updates, Sam never saw or heard from her, though Carl was easily traced. His glossy, big beach church had mushroomed in three short years, and his weekly sermons were broadcast on one of Tallahassee’s cable channels.
Sam was still an anthropologist at heart, and if he happened upon Carl while channel surfing late at night, he’d pause awhile and watch Carl stalk around the pulpit in his $1,000 Hugo Boss suit, a Rolex on one wrist, a thick gold chain on the other. For all his media glitz, his doctrinal roots appeared to be sunk deep in the swamp of Holy Roller Hendrix. In his mix of strict moral code and overflowing emotion and bullying Calvinist sureness, Carl was nothing like his father, not at all shy or vulnerable, but huge and forceful and dynamic, the father figure every poor bastard on earth wished he’d had, someone to set him straight, make it plain. Carl often spoke of his poor, country upbringing and populated his stories with a cast of colorful family characters: his saintly old papa; his comically kooky wife; his small, highly photogenic daughters, who were named odd, old-English names like Tanner or Taylor or Trent.
Sam noticed Carl never called Hendrix by name, nor did he mention his sister, who was never caught on the camera’s frequent pans across the family pew. Lena was there every week, the prototype of the faithful media wife, gazing up with childlike devotion. She bore small resemblance to the carefree teenager who used to zip around the campground half-naked, but had taken on the persona of an old soul—an old Victorian soul, her dresses all lace and fluttery hem, buttoned to the chin.
As Sam sat on his couch in his boxer shorts, crunching numbers and eating leftover Chinese, he wondered what Lena had done with all those tiny bikinis now that she’d become fundamentalist Christian royalty.
He never considered calling her sister-in-law to ask, just watched them idly as he moved up the ranks to financial officer—a position that consumed his bone marrow and made for a lot of hair-pulling when the legislature was in town. He was sitting at his coffee table one night in February, surrounded by all the paraphernalia of last-minute revision—calculators and laptops and fee schedules—when he came across Carl and lingered to watch awhile. He was unloading his usual crock of money-grubbing bullshit (“seed faith,” he called it) when the camera zoomed in for one of its adoring-wife shots and inadvertently captured a sliver of a woman beside her, taller and darker and eminently comfortable tucked into a pew, as if she’d been raised there. She was ignoring the sermon to whisper something aside to Lena, something so hilarious that she lost her churchy frost and slapped a hand to her mouth to muffle a laugh, her eyes as young as a schoolgirl’s.
It was Jolie, albeit in profile, her hair ironed to fit a face lit with an air of pretty mischief as she undermined her brother’s thundering righteousness with some little insider joke. When she detected the eye of the peering camera, she met the lens squarely, with a raised eyebrow and a dry, baiting smile that for a split second seemed illogically pointed at Sam, as if she were looking through the wire at him in his living room.
It was over in a blink, the roving camera returning to Carl, who was telling one of his hilarious down-home stories that had his congregation holding their sides with laughter. Sam waited for another glimpse of Jolie, but it didn’t come, the show ending as it always did, with Carl sitting in a high-backed leather chair in one of his resplendent suits, humbly asking his blessed viewers to consider opening their lives to the great blessing that would come if they made a pledge to help support him reach souls for the Kingdom.
“Sell a suit, asshole,” Sam muttered, then clicked off the television and sat there a long time, staring at the empty screen and trying to frame an explanation, a sound theory of Jolie Hoyt.
One that would not only explain the two feet of twisted scar on his chest, but her subsequent silence and the whole enchilada of his experience with her, in all its unwieldy paradox—the poverty and the richness; faith and ferocity; welcome and dismissal. Try as he might, he could find no combining thread, though the lack of cohesiveness didn’t cut him off at the knees as it once had.
Mostly it just made him curious, and when Wes Dennis dutifully dropped by Sam’s office later that month and reported that his mother had called and told him Ray Hoyt had died, Sam offered nothing more than a grunt in reply.
“I’m thinking about going to the funeral,” Wes said, lounging in the doorway. “Wanna tag along? There’ll be a big feed, and Jolie’ll be there, in all her luscious corruption. May need a shoulder to cry on.” He grinned.
Sam was in the heat of a final budget revision, surrounded by columns of stacked folders and working on four computers at a time. He answered over his reading glasses, “Think I’ll pass. But if you talk to her, ask her if she’s ironing the boss’s pants yet.”
Wes was a fan of overblown male rhetoric and laughed a big cowboy laugh. He was quieter on his return, making little of the funeral except to admit that he’d taken his mother; that it was nice. He was so cagey, so uncharacteristically monotone, that Sam’s radar was tweaked enough to ask if Wes had had the balls to pass along Sam’s message.
After all his delight in gossiping about the Hoyts, Wes seemed suddenly a little hesitant in answering, rubbing his neck and confiding, “You know, Bubba, getting in a pissing contest with any body in Hendrix is never a good idea. They’re a tricky bunch, even the church. They take that inbred thing to a whole other level.”
Wes’s hesitancy only piqued Sam’s interest more, and after a few days digging, Wes finally broke down and confessed, “I didn’t see Jol—place was mobbed—all these people from Carl’s church. I had no idea he’d come on so strong. I ran into him when I was going out to the car to pick up Mama. He’s big as a house—shining suit and cuffs and gold cuff links—looks like a goddamn New Jersey mob boss in person. It’s crazy. We stood there a minute talking old times, and what the hell, I jumped in and told him what you said about Jol. And, God, son”—Wes whistled—“he was piss
ed. Thought he was gonna pick me up and shake me like a poodle. I’m sorry, man,” Wes apologized with a humility that made him seem, for the first time, approachably human. “I had no idea. If I was you, I’d keep to the highway when you’re over there. A lot of dead bodies end up over there in the swamp.”
Sam considered the advice a moment, then sat down his cigarette and unbuttoned the top of his dress shirt and gave a little Hendrix-scar peep show—enough that Wesley cursed, long and with feeling.
He asked the usual questions: who did it, and why; questions Sam tended to avoid, as there was no answer. He told him the bare details, which Wes found as astounding as the scar. “You mean you went hunting in the swamp with a drunken crew of Hoyts while you were shagging Jolie on the side? Shit, son, anybody ever tell you about the lynching they had down there? What they did to that ol’ boy?”
“Yeah, I heard,” Sam admitted as he buttoned his shirt, but it wasn’t enough.
The Hendrix Lynching had become one of those historical moments that could not be discussed without the inclusion of a few more salacious details, which Wes supplied with the vigor expected of a man who shopped L.L. Bean: “It wasn’t just an ordinary hanging—it was a circus; in the paper, beforehand. Invitations issued, like a goddamn baby shower. They were swamp-running savages, the Hoyts—butchered him like a hog.”
“They did it? The Hoyts? You got proof?” Sam asked, but got nothing but a shrug.
“It wasn’t a secret,” Wes countered. “Shit, everybody was in on it. Ask Carl. He knows. Everybody does—hell, people kept Kite’s fingers and toes for souvenirs. They sold goddamn postcards, at the drugstore.”
Wes was too flustered to add more, just ran a hand through his hair and advised, “I’m sorry if I stirred anything up. If I was you, I’d just let it go, forget it. It kind of shook me up, Carl turning on a dime like that. I told Mama on the way home, and she said that was it, with her and Hendrix. She wasn’t ever going back. If I was you, I’d do likewise.”
Chapter Thirteen
Though she was careful to hide it, Jolie was undeniably shaken when she learned that Sam was living in Tallahassee, little more than an hour down the road, and had never called, never bothered to drop by and prove he was even alive. She was perplexed enough to discuss it with Lena, who was still cagey about the shooting and offered no particular theories on either his job or his indifference, other than a hitch of a shoulder and a wry “Maybe he’s afraid. Gosh, Jol, can you blame him?”
Most people would have bought the argument, but to Jolie, it didn’t ring true. Since when had Sam Lense been afraid of anything?
She might have worried it more, might actually have picked up the phone and called him herself, if her father hadn’t been so obviously in decline, felled by a third stroke weeks later, this one appreciably worse, paralyzing him on his left side, so he could no longer speak. He lingered another few months, till a final heart attack felled him, with no warning, in the middle of the afternoon. The hospice nurse was on hand and had him transported to the hospital in Cleary, in critical condition.
They located Carl easily enough, though Jolie was less easy to put a finger on, as she was at the moment of Ray’s attack sitting on a third-story balcony of a condo she was redecorating in Destin, eating a ham sandwich and watching a school of dolphins leap by in Choctawhatchee Bay. Though by no means a rare sight on the Gulf, this particular pod caught her eye, made her forget her sandwich and pause to give them her full attention as they leapt in tandem in the glittering surf, up and down, in joyous abandon. Their unrestrained delight fascinated her, and she watched till they were nothing more than a flash of silver in the distance. She was gathering the trash from her lunch when the foreman of the construction crew came to the door with an urgent call from Hugh, who told her that her father had a heart attack. She went straight to the hospital, where the doctors were cautiously optimistic about his regaining consciousness.
Jolie didn’t argue the matter, though she read the dolphins as a final message from her father that he was leaving her now, going home with abandon, leaping out with joy to a deep and mysterious sea. The image sustained her through the two-day vigil on the ICU, till Wednesday night, when even the most optimistic doctor admitted Ray was beyond retrieval. On Thursday morning, she and Carl let them unhook the respirator and held Ray’s hands while he took his final breath, with Carl unexpectedly coming apart when the machine began to flatline, his sobs echoing down the hospital halls. Jolie was, as usual, the stoic and didn’t shed a tear, just leaned over the bed and kissed her father good-bye, whispered to him to swim hard, one day she would see him again.
She left the hysteria to the Hoyt men, who never cried at anything unless one of their kinsmen died, then carried on with primal emotion, sobbing and inconsolable and most inconveniently drunk. Jolie did what she could to manage them, a thankless task not made any easier by the cattle call Carl’s celebrity made of the modest funeral. The overlong, overbright service wasn’t a tribute to her father as much as a tribute to Carl’s ability to draw a crowd. On and on the speakers went, one more glittery than the next, by the end of it making Jolie wish she’d joined her uncles in their drink-a-thon.
The after-funeral gathering had been limited to family only, and members of El Bethel, and the difference couldn’t have been starker. The service was all capped teeth and Fake Bake; the family supper was held on rickety tables in the fellowship hall, overlooked by faded, kindly lithographs of Jesus. Lena sent the girls home with a nanny so she could sit with Jolie and the last of the old Sisters, Sister Noble and Sister Wright, who’d cried like widows at the service, but regrouped in the warm light of Jolie’s and Lena’s attention.
They hadn’t grown any more tactful with the years and wasted no time in offering a critique of the celebrity speakers, deeming their sermons canned and uninspired, and predicting Carl would soon go to fat, “just like his deddy.”
They said it in Carl’s full hearing as they were mighty suspicious of his new wealth, and overweening popularity, and spent the afternoon making not-so-veiled references to Carl about the perils of riches and the eye of the needle. They were scarcely less blunt with their darling Jolie. For even out in Hendrix, rumors were beginning to circulate about her and her illustrious boss man, Hubert Altman, of all people—and it wasn’t natural, that one wasn’t.
Sister Wright didn’t like it a bit and asked Jolie point-blank whatever happened to thet Yankee boy she user court? Thet Sam?
Before Jolie could answer, Lena smoothly intervened, telling them that Sam was doing fine. He was married, living in Tallahassee, working for the state.
“Well, I declare,” the old woman intoned with great sorrow. “He was a well-spoken young man—would have made a better husband than some I could name, who got more money than they got good sense.”
Their old-women meddling made for a bit of comic relief on a trying afternoon, and when Hugh came to the door at four and hesitantly knocked, Jolie almost called, Coming, darling, just to see Sister Wright’s expression.
She didn’t out of consideration for Hugh, who wasn’t too comfortable in Hendrix in broad daylight and would rather be pilloried than stay after dark. He wouldn’t come inside, but told Jolie that he was done, meaning that he’d finished the last chore of the florist: moving the flowers to the fresh grave, covering the gash of orange dirt so it wouldn’t offend the sensitivity of visiting mourners.
Jolie was feeling a rare affection toward the old pain in the ass, for his care with her father’s flowers, including a huge spray of ivory lilies he’d arranged himself, from the Altman family—an unexpected gesture that had been the talk of the after-funeral dinner. She gripped his hand and told him, “Thank you, Hugh. You’ve been great.”
He appeared marginally pleased, told her he’d be back at the end of the week to pick up the stands and sets, a small reminder that Jolie was only supposed to take off a week from work, due back bright and early the following Monday. Punctual on such matters,
Hugh showed up late on Saturday afternoon on the way home from a wedding in Vernon.
He went to the graveyard first, to gather his stands, then dropped by the parsonage, supposedly to see how Jolie was doing, though he couldn’t help but make delicate inquiries about her plans to return to work on Monday, and if they were still on go. She assured him they were, for with Lena’s help she’d almost finished cleaning out the parsonage. They had come upon all manner of strange objects in the task, including a bottle of merlot that some misguided accountant friend of Carl’s had sent her father for Christmas.
She offered it to Hugh, who pronounced it generic, but drinkable, and asked if she would mind opening it. “I’ve been going like a house afire all week,” he told her with a hint of reproach at her absence, “could use a glass, if you don’t mind.”
Jolie cared not at all, but warned, “We don’t have a . . . cork opener, or whatever you call it.”
“No worries.” He produced a key chain that had a wine key on it.
He opened it with skill and poured himself a generous serving in an old jelly glass, the only glass containers that hadn’t been packed. She refused a glass of her own and drank cold tea instead, not in the jumbled house, but on the back porch, which was lovely that time of day, the sun to the west long and golden, turning the adjoining fields a rare shade of celery green.
Even Hugh seemed touched by the charm of the place, commenting after a moment, “I can’t imagine this was so bad a place to be raised. You had the river and the woods, a green, rural childhood. Lovely vista, across the fields,” he added with a wave of his jelly glass.
“It was all right, kind of lonely. And it was Hendrix.”
She didn’t have to elaborate, as Hugh was local-born and knew all the stories. He sipped his wine and agreed, “Ah, yes, Hendrix. Such a reputation. You’d never think, to hear the talk, that it was this lush and green, actually quite peaceful. I must say, when I was setting up at the church, with the old pulpit, the wooden floors—I found Hendrix quite charming. Harmless, even.”