“Holly, honey, come on. It’s snowing hard. We’d better get back to the farm while we can. We need to stop at the Piggly Wiggly and stock up on a few things.”
“Yes, Mother.” I walked to the door and whispered to Aunt Elizabeth, “Should we head home tonight?”
“I don’t think so, Holly. It’s supposed to be warmer tomorrow. Even if the snow sticks tonight, it will probably be gone by noon.”
After dinner I sat in the club chair in the corner of the living room, Jigger by my side, and studied the work files I had brought with me. The other three women and Binky sat at the game table in the opposite corner and played bridge. The nice thing about family is that you don’t have to entertain them. For so many years, my guests have been strangers. Even new friends were strangers who had to be talked to and listened to politely. Silences had to be filled. Despite their craziness or perhaps because of it, my family has always given me space and peace when I needed it. Only with strangers is silence embarrassing.
Again, I slept soundly until Victoria knocked on the door at 5:30 A.M. Although it was not yet daylight, I could see Victoria’s ashen face in the dim hall light and somehow I knew that I dreaded to hear her speak. “Ham just called.” Victoria hesitated, then continued, “Garland’s been killed.” She stopped again. Aunt Elizabeth gasped, sprang from her bed, and hugged her sister. A son from one of Ham’s earlier marriages, Garland was Victoria and Aunt Elizabeth’s half and only brother and my only uncle.
“How’s Daddy?” Aunt Elizabeth’s voice was calm but her hands were shaking.
“I think he’s in shock. We need to be there as soon as we can. I’ll wake Mother and Binky and make coffee.”
“How’d it happen?” Aunt Elizabeth asked flatly.
“A helicopter crash. A group from their tour had rented it in St. Thomas to take them over to St. Barth’s. I don’t know if the pilot lost control or if the helicopter malfunctioned. I was too stunned to ask.”
“Was there a fire?” Aunt Elizabeth continued.
“I don’t know. I need to tell Mother. She loved Garland.”
By six o’clock the group was dressed, packed, and assembled in the kitchen drinking coffee. Victoria and Charlotte discussed what must be done to the house and for the horses before they left indefinitely. Although she had outlived both her parents and two brothers and two sisters, Charlotte’s stricken expression revealed that death had surprised her once again. Gentle Garland, her almost and only son.
How old had Garland been when Charlotte married Ham? He was seven years older than Victoria and five when his own mother shot herself—an act that Southern women did not commit in those days or even now. It was as if her last act must not be mistaken, but must be understood as an expression of her final outrage towards Ham and towards life. Why was I thinking about the death of a woman I never knew, who died long before I was born? I realized I was remembering Garland’s words of comfort to me when my own father died twelve years ago.
“Holly, I know it’s hard. I lost my mother the same way. You never get over it. I don’t think you’re supposed to.” Those words had been more comforting than all the other sympathies offered. I hadn’t wanted to hear the intended but thoughtless kindnesses: “It will be better with time” or “You have your life ahead of you, Holly. You’re so young. Tom wouldn’t want you to be so sad.” I hadn’t wanted to think about life without my father. I grieved for him then and I suppose always will.
Only Uncle Garland had given me permission. “Let yourself grieve, Holly.” My mother grieved, still, I knew. Running from every commitment, never having a man in her life who wasn’t merely one of the changing faces attracted to my gypsy mother. “One of Victoria’s hangers on,” Aunt Elizabeth used to say. “Another one of Victoria’s new best friends.” She picked up people like she shopped for clothes or furniture and discarded them the same way. Never intentionally or cruelly. Almost accidentally. Like me and my men, Victoria attracted people, listened to them, laughed with them, shared confidences, and moved on. Victoria’s people could return at any time, and she would adopt them again temporarily, and be there for a while with interest and sympathy and concern.
She never went away exactly, but like me with my men, Victoria merely lost interest. She would be physically present, friendly but detached. No one ever felt badly treated by her. Victoria had a way of totally centering on other people’s problems, asking the questions they had always wanted to answer but had never asked. She patted them. She listened to their most intimate secrets. She never told their secrets. She merely forgot them and the people themselves when they ceased to surprise or intrigue her. Predictability was not endurable for Victoria. If she didn’t know what she was going to do next, how could she possibly be interested in others whose obsessive-compulsive natures were the antithesis of her own?
Victoria is the only person I have ever known who is equally passionate and detached. Like Ham, her passionate interests, whatever they are at the time, draw others to her. She makes them feel that their common interest is the most challenging, the most exciting activity anyone on earth could be enjoying at that moment.
But Victoria’s obsessions are always fleeting, and when Victoria flees, so also does the magic of the shared activity. Even riding horseback with her was more fun, because Victoria could be more alive and witty than anyone else I’ve ever known. Whatever anyone did with Victoria, he never did with such heightened pleasure again—not alone or with anyone else. Victoria’s former friends had been known to give up dulcimers and coin collecting after her retreat. She fed off the enthusiasm she created in others. She extended her aura to them. But her own was fueled by some fire within herself that never quite warmed her. Like a tornado, her tremendous energy would suck people in—into a hollow core. I suspected that if I could see Victoria’s center, it would be as solidly and silently frozen as Dante’s ninth circle.
Had Victoria adopted her own mother’s detachment in order to survive? Was it in the genes of these stoic mountain women, or had my father’s death so ruptured Victoria’s own life, that she never completely felt again? Victoria is so hard to know, so paradoxical. At times I have been obsessed with her. Whether I am fascinated with the enigma, whether I felt I had to crack through ice to get to love, or whether I thought there was no hope of understanding myself until I laid her bare, I did not know.
9 Wakes And Waves
AFTER I LOADED our bags into the Bronco, the snow was still falling. The now invisible lane leading down to the river and over to the main highway was encrusted with six inches of dense white powder. Snow covered the ground in all directions, streamed downward from the cedars and pines, and posed upright on the top of the previously barren limbs of the giant stick trees, which in the spring would shed their disguise and leaf out as oak and elm and hickory. This still, silent landscape is pristine and almost primeval, I thought, but from today, will I always associate snow with death? My father Tom had also died in February, but it was a soggy, rain-swept day, gloomy and typical of February in Eastern Arkansas. Winter rains depress me, but never snow. It had not snowed at all that year. I often thought that people needed sunshine on their heads to keep their brain cells from sagging. For an instant, black humor overcame me, always my way of relieving pain. I thought of the lighted baseball caps I had seen on television, a recent invention to relieve light-dark depression for people who lived in the far north where they were exposed to too few hours of sunshine. For an instant I envisioned myself donning a lighted John Deere cap on February first and removing it when the tulip trees burst forth in extravagant purple bloom in late March.
At least I wouldn’t have to wash my hair every day. Then my mood darkened again as the feeling of deadness set in once again as it had throughout the night. The poet was wrong: April isn’t the cruelest month—not for me, not even here in tornado country.
Traffic was slow on the highway, and Aunt Elizabeth sat encased in her own plastic pain beside me. All morning she had spoken only whe
n necessary. She deserves a rest. Every day she deals with somebody else’s troubles. Soon the family individually and together will come to her for help, for relief from the disbelief and numbness they feel. Nobody knew Garland well, but everyone in the family loved him. I could not remember Garland’s judging any of us, not even in our most advanced states of craziness. He was the kind of uncle, brother, son who would help bury bodies, no questions asked, and now we were about to bury his, if there is one.
Most of the time, except at that time of the month, I did not think about what I did not want to think about. I postponed consideration of any new, unpleasant knowledge until I could later deal with it. My response to others who introduced an uncomfortable subject was a simple: “I don’t want to talk about that right now,” and like a child in avoidance, I didn’t. Now it was enough to deal with Garland’s death. His body, I would think about it when I had to. Far better to get this news of Garland in bits and pieces. Bits and pieces of Uncle Garland. Oh my God. Where is my mind going with that? Don’t think about it. The puzzle will be completed soon enough. I forced my mind to think of Uncle alive, whole.
I realized that Garland’s death represented the end of the Carter line—a hundred-year lineage in Arkansas alone. Aunt Elizabeth and Victoria had produced no sons and Uncle Garland had never married. How had he kept from doing his duty? Maybe being prosecutor all those years was enough, especially when he never seemed to like the job very much. I remembered never having thought about being a lawyer, not until years after my father died; and I returned to Little Rock and found that, without invoking my Delta Ridge connections, the only non-clerical job available to me was work as an aide for legal services. I quickly discovered that I liked the work and felt useful. While I couldn’t imagine myself practicing law for mere money, I saw the intrinsic rewards of service to others and how good I felt when I became consumed by their problems and, at least temporarily, forgot my own.
My motivation to attend law school was to have greater knowledge and skill to help others who needed legal help and couldn’t afford it. Civil litigation had seemed a kind of sell out. Being paid well for my knowledge and ability, I feared would end any altruistic benefits legal services had provided and turn me into the kind of money-grubbing philistine I’d neither respected nor wanted to become. But now I realized that I became one of them the day I took the $20,000 present from my grandfather; and to look with condemnation on him and others like him made me a hypocrite and an ingrate as well.
At eighteen my sole motivation had been to escape from Delta Ridge and the pain I felt, but I couldn’t imagine leaving the South. So I had chosen the University of Virginia and majored in English literature like the other women in the family—not math or accounting or business like the men. But, Uncle Garland too had been an English major. Always a quiet man, he often sat on the front porch of his old Victorian house and read English Romantic poetry silently to himself or aloud to whomever would listen. In me he had instilled his love for Lord Byron, and I often thought in his youth Garland must have looked like pictures I had seen of Byron, with the dark curly hair and dark eyes that belonged to no one else in the family; but in age Garland was a delicate version of Ham. How strange that he loved Byron. Garland shunned adventure as ardently as Byron sought it. Dealing with criminals, seeing every day society’s dark underbelly, could not have been pleasant for a person of Garland’s sensibilities.
That’s why he took his trips. To escape to the saner world he would have chosen had he had a choice. But like me, the choice was made for him, and he fulfilled his obligation to the family and the firm. And I had agreed to do the same. I was back in Delta Ridge where I said I’d never be, practicing civil law, which I said I never would, but still living with myself, for how long I did not know. I remembered Garland’s frequent quote from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: “Our life is a false nature—’tis not in the harmony of things.”
My mind returned to the present. Victoria had insisted that Aunt Elizabeth and I leave immediately to be with Ham. She assured us that she and Charlotte would leave the farm as soon as the horses were seen to and the house protected from the winter cold. Surely Mother will come. But I wondered. I suspected that neither she nor grandmother had been in Delta Ridge in years. It would be like Victoria to make a phone call, send flowers, make an excuse to Ham, and not appear, as she had done on his numerous birthdays and other special occasions. When in Little Rock, my custom had been to spend part of the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays at Ridgecrest Hall with Ham and part at the farm with mother and grandmother. Aunt Elizabeth and Felicia did the same. When had Mother last seen her father? When had she last seen Garland? Would she come today?
“Are you warm enough?” I wanted to know if my aunt needed to talk.
“I’m fine, Holly. I was thinking about Felicia. Wondering how Garland’s death would affect her. She’s had so many fathers. For a long while Garland has been the only consistent male in her life, and she truly loved him. Garland was such a good listener. I’m sure Felicia discussed personal problems with him she never mentioned to me—especially her loss and confusion each time one of my husbands left. None of them had much contact with her after we divorced. She seldom heard from even her own father after he moved away and remarried.
“Garland was probably the least judgmental person I’ve ever known,” I confided in her. “Why do you suppose he never married?”
“I don’t know. I imagine the death of his mother when he was so young had some really traumatic effect on him. If I had become a psychologist sooner, maybe I could have helped him. Well, no. Garland was eleven years older than I am. He needed help as a child, but in those days, especially in the South, children weren’t really thought of as people, certainly not as damaged people. Ham would have seen any sign of Garland’s needing help as family weakness. Whatever his outward expression of grief may have been, I’m only speculating here, but knowing Ham as I do, I assume he would have thought that Garland would outgrow his problems or bury them as Ham did when he buried Garland’s mother. Burying feelings is one of this family’s major accomplishments.”
Jigger slept quietly in the back seat after having become exhausted from attacking snowflakes through the window. The car, a silent snow-encrusted cocoon, carried silent women through the still, gray and white morning.
The trip to Delta Ridge took four hours, rather than the usual two and a half. The Vine Street house was empty. Felicia’s note on the kitchen table said that both she and Queen Esther were at the Hall with Ham, and Uncle Wylie was at the funeral home making arrangements. Thank God, that means there’s a body.
Although we both were wearing jeans and boots, Aunt Elizabeth said, “Holly, let’s go now. We can change later. Mother and Vicki will go directly to the Hall.”
When Aunt Elizabeth pulled her old Mercedes into the circular driveway, a dozen cars were already parked, and a giant wreath of golden chrysanthemums draped the massive door. Death in the South, I remembered, remains a splendid event.
Lee, Ham’s chauffeur, servant, attendant, today appeared as butler when he opened the door. Inside, women with familiar faces, whom I guessed represented the Episcopal Church, greeted and hugged Aunt Elizabeth first, then me, and uttered in turn: “My, how you’ve grown up,” and “Sorry to see you in such circumstances,” or “So good to have you back home,” and “How’s your mother?” If placed before a firing squad, I couldn’t have recalled one of their names. Past the gauntlet, we both moved through the wide hall to the closed double doors of the library.
“Your daddy’s in there with Michael, Elizabeth,” one of the women volunteered.
Ushering me through the massive doors, Aunt Elizabeth turned the fluted brass knobs to close them quietly behind her. Ham was leaning on the large leather-topped desk, a crystal glass half full in his right hand. He rose and reached for Aunt Elizabeth, hugged her to him, and placed his other arm around my shoulders—glass and all. His drawn face looked now so old and tired as he
made a sobbing sound that turned into a funny hacking cough as he escorted us to the brown leather sofa by the fire. Michael, standing next to Ham, looked so sad, but I was baffled as to why.
“Where’s Victoria?” Ham said when he regained enough composure to talk.
“She’s on her way. They had to see to the farm before they could leave.” I prayed my aunt’s statement was true. “What about arrangements?” I was relieved that Elizabeth continued to speak for us.
“Wylie’s over at Russell’s now taking care of it. The family will receive guests here at the house tonight. The memorial service will be at St. Paul’s in the morning at 10:00 o’clock. There’s no reason to wait since Garland had no other family. We’re all here now that Holly’s home.” My grandfather smiled sadly and patted my arm.
“Michael, would you pour me a glass of wine?” Aunt Elizabeth asked. “And one for Holly too.”
“Mr. Ham, it’s your call from Little Rock,” the dignified Lee appeared and announced. His gray, Southern butler garb had obviously been carefully selected for the occasion. He placed the portable telephone in Ham’s hand.
“Yes, John. Thank you, John. We appreciate it, John. Yes. Yes. That’s what I need you to take care of for me right away. Yes. That’s it. Exactly. Can’t succeed himself. Press release next week. Michael, do you have a picture?” Michael looked puzzled but nodded yes.
“Thank you, John, goodbye.”
The phone rang again immediately. “Take this damned thing out of here, Lee. It’s been like this all morning. I don’t want to talk to anyone else, Lee, except my family. Show them in when they get here. You remember Miss Victoria?”
“Yes sir.”
Please Mother, come, I pleaded silently.
“It’s taken care of, Michael. You’ll be appointed acting prosecutor to fill Garland’s unexpired term. Of course, you won’t be able to succeed yourself. Garland had a year and a half left on his term, so Holly will start campaigning in the fall for the spring primary. Michael, you need to officially appoint her deputy prosecutor Monday.” I looked at my grandfather in amazement.
Delta Ridge Page 8