Cementville

by Paulette Livers

  “Tell how you got started singing,” Wanda entreated. “Tell about the Sacred Harp, and how Uncle Bertram taught you the old songs from the Spanish Wars.” That was how she coaxed him away from his tears, and back to her.

  SHE LEANS ON HER ELBOWS now, sinking into the green cushion of Weeping Rock’s mossy surface, and lets her head fall between her shoulder blades so she has an upside-down view of the locust grove ringing the side yard. A breeze rushes up from the valley floor and the trees rain their creamy blossoms. A few catch in her hair as if kowtowing to her earlier musings and, releasing the spring of its debts, let summer in at last. By tomorrow the fragrant petals will belong to the soil, doing their part to feed the blades of new grass carpeting the grove. Old Jimbo gives a whinny from his pen next to the chicken house.

  “I know, I know, you’re ready for the dang-gom plough,” Wanda calls out to him. The garden should be in by now, but she has dreaded breaking into the hard ground, wrestling the clay into another year of submission. A heavy sky threatens to rupture over the valley. The sun has not managed to part the purple veil of clouds. She really should turn the soil today. With her luck, if she waits and it finally rains, the soil will go from hard and dry to too soggy to plough. Winter was mild enough that the cole crops from the fall garden didn’t die off, and Wanda and her mother have enjoyed fresh greens every day to the point of being sick of them. A few root vegetables too, from seed she scattered in late February. But there are only so many knobby carrots one can crunch before a person will kill for the stinging citrus burst of a tomato in her mouth. The weather will turn hot soon enough.

  Today is the last Saturday of the month, and normally she would have already driven to the A&P and back. It’s up to her now to get groceries in since, for all practical purposes, the lupus has turned her mother into a cripple. They’ve worked out a system with the store manager whereby their grocery order is assembled and waiting for Wanda so she can pull into the parking lot a few minutes before the doors are unlocked, rush in and pay, and rush out before any other customers have shown up. But even that feels like an impossibility today, given the arrival of the bodies.

  Wanda shivers. Please, God, she thinks, don’t let my mother take a notion that we ought to call on cousin Arlene, offer our condolences for the loss of her Danny.

  Besides her cousin and the seven soldiers blown to bits at Blacksnake, there’s another that will return today. A maimed POW is to be feted at a parade—though the coming storm may have something to say about that. The article in the Picayune said the soldier had lost a limb, had to be airlifted to a hospital in the Philippines after the Green Berets got him out. The war has made her nearly glad that she and Loretta have forgone the luxury of a TV set. Although, sitting in Charlene Cahill’s living room, Wanda had watched, breathless, the coverage of the POW’s daring rescue. She remembers Harlan O’Brien before he was a prisoner of war, a handsome, smart boy behind her by a grade or two. She was always too shy to speak to boys like him. As they say, he comes from good people.

  Wanda has allowed Charlene Cahill, reigning monarch at the Saint Brigid College Library since everybody can remember, to talk her into volunteering a few hours a week. Cementville is not big enough to have its own real public library, but there has never been a time that Saint Brigid College did not open its doors to anybody who wanted a book. Charlene is pestering Wanda to come work for her. “Just part time,” she tells Wanda. “You love books. And it would bring in a little money.”

  It’s no secret in town that Poose left them land and a house and little else. Loretta tried to hang onto the sheep but finally sold them off a year after he died. Buck Farber has driven up the hill three times already this spring to see if they’re ready to put the farm on the market. “What with your mother so ill,” he says to Wanda, smacking his lips as though he could eat the place right there for supper. The real estate man always stands with one white-shod foot in the doorway. She never invites him in, with his country-club white oxfords and matching white belt and the pants so bright green they hurt your eyes.

  Wanda has not ruled out going to work at the library. Maybe only for a day or two a week. Enough to keep the county taxes paid, and Buck Farber away from the door.

  In idle hours she invents stories for the busy people in town below, imagining lives in which things actually happen—or hold that potential, anyway. Some stories she doesn’t have to invent. Gossip has a way of traveling, even up to Hanging Valley Farm, even to the infamous hermit Wanda Ferguson Slidell. Her best invention is the one she has made of herself: Thirty is already long in the tooth in these parts, and she was never all that attractive anyway. The only man to ever look her way was crazy Carl Juell, and everybody knows what became of Carl—last fifteen years in the nuthouse. The newest rumor around town has it he’s coming home soon. Wanda breathes in and wraps both arms tight across her ribs to quell the thumping.

  She is not ashamed of her hermit status. In fact, she has considered nailing a second sign to the Witch Elm at the bottom of the hill: The Hermitage. The issue of marriage, or any other life than the one she has, has never come up. In her experience it all ends in hard work and heartache anyway, something she would as soon do alone.

  Look at her grandparents. Poose had to convince Mem to marry him, to leave her own father’s comfortable house in town and help him make a life on top of this hardscrabble knob rising above Cementville. He was set on recovering the Ferguson family name, which was associated in these parts with horse thieving and sloth and cattle rustling and drunkenness. He worked himself to the bone to scrape together the down payment for this land and carried his reluctant sweetheart Caroline here on the back of a mule one April morning in 1909.

  And Loretta too had to be snagged into marriage by Stanley Slidell, although anyone who knew the circumstances would not have imagined it such a difficult job. She was poor, if beautiful, and a Ferguson to boot. He was handsome and rich, the only son of the founding family, the last Slidell, and sure to inherit what was left of the original fortune. The Slidells owned the town when you got right down to it, said it was them who built it, ignoring the bent backs of the other five hundred some odd who had dug the sewers and hammered the nails and worked the stills and the vats and guarded the barrels at the distillery. They who had quarried the lime and ground the cement and got it into trucks to be hauled to wherever.

  But Stanley. He wooed and he crooned. To see pictures of him, your first thought would be lothario, or at least trouble. But he was devoted to Loretta, when he wasn’t gambling and drinking. Then, then he was just gone. Over and over, Wanda had to make her mother tell how it happened, how before daylight that morning the sheriff knocked on the door of the carriage house behind the Slidell mansion. It was where Evelyn Slidell allowed them to stay, her son and his unworthy bride and their new baby (Wanda herself). Stanley had already been gone three or four days.

  “Didn’t you wonder where he was? Hadn’t you reported him missing?” Wanda wanted to know. But Loretta said she was accustomed to it, him disappearing for even a week at a time, when he was in his cups.

  “And what did the sheriff say when he knocked on the door? How did he tell you?”

  That Stanley was sleeping (Loretta did not call it passed out) in the backseat of Buck Farber’s Buick, while Buck went in to visit the bootlegger Shine Calhoun, leaving the car running out at the curb (it was late November, and quite cold); and a poker game took hold of Buck and he lost track of time. He didn’t know the carbon monoxide had gotten Stanley until he tried to rouse him in front of the Slidell mansion.

  “And what did you do?” Wanda would hold her breath and wait.

  “When you started crying, I fed you,” her mother told her for the umpteenth time.

  Thinking on it now, Wanda found it the perfect ending to a devastating story, although at the time she was never satisfied. Her incessant requests to hear about her father’s death must have held the childish hope for a different end, in which he staggered up th
e iron steps of the carriage house and kissed his wife and baby good night before tumbling into bed to sleep it off. He might swear off liquor and cards, and the three of them would go for lunch together to Happy’s Soups and More, or walk around town on moonlit nights.

  And Wanda would not be afraid of anything.

  It was the kind of thing that made Poose shake his head and say, “Wishing don’t make it so.”

  LORETTA WILL BE UP BY now. Wanda stands and stretches her long backbone in an arc and heads for the henhouse to gather eggs. Clutches of new chicks follow close behind their speckled mothers, scratching beneath the horse chestnut. They run toward Wanda for the corn they’ve come to expect at the sight of her approaching. There is Jimbo, sleeping on his feet. She would not have thought mules could grieve, but he has been off his feed since his sister Julie passed on this winter.

  People always say a mule lives to kick you, that if they live to forty, on their last day on earth they’ll use their final breath to shoot out a leg that can kick in any direction and give you one solid. You’d never prove that by Julie and Jimbo, gentle as any house cat the entire of their lives. Wanda pulls a couple of carrots from her pocket and Jimbo puckers his mouth into a hoarse whinny that ends in a heehaw.

  She does not let herself wonder how much longer he can hang on. This is the thought she is letting go when she sees them enter the valley, the caravan of long black cars carrying the boys home.

  TWO

  Maureen Juell at thirteen is on the cusp of knowing memory’s vagary. Even for an imagination as wild and dramatic as hers, the accretion of events on a Saturday in May will make her wonder later if it wasn’t too much, if a single day could hold all that, or if it would turn out to be another crazy concoction that would someday come tumbling down around her head. Pieces of the story she will not stop claiming with some confidence: That this was the day seven young men, once alive, came home not; that a storm blew into their lives, changing more than they reckoned. It may or may not have been the day her mother confiscated the Ouija board, or the day their downhill neighbor, the wife of the town no-account, left him, this time she swore, for good. These events on their own might have been enough to cause the Juell family to miss the parade in town commemorating the fallen and welcoming a one-legged hero back from the war.

  Of this much she is certain. It was on this day that her brother walked up the gravel road from the Greyhound station in town and knocked on their family’s front door like a stranger.

  ALL MORNING THE SWOLLEN SKY leaned and loured over the valley. The view from the kitchen window was exactly what Maureen imagined it would be right before Judgment Day, not a soul moving, not a bird twitching or a leaf falling.

  Her father said, “I don’t like it, Katherine. Looks like trouble.” Her mother rolled her eyes and shook her head at what she called Willis’s prognostications of gloom, his penchant for signs and omens. Katherine Hume Juell was a reluctant convert to the staunch Catholicism that cast a wide net over the region. She had moved to Cementville as a teenager to live with her uncle, Judge Freeman Hume, when her parents vanished on a trans-oceanic flight. Katherine maintained that nothing in Scripture should be taken literally. She certainly did not believe in the End Times, as Maureen and her father liked to. Her people were Unitarians from Connecticut. Whereas the Juells reached generations back to when the town was founded, and Cementville was a place where such things mattered. Their brand of the faith was a peppery blend of the mysticism of Aquinas and Matthew’s Baptism of Fire.

  Willis was swigging his coffee to its dregs when their downhill neighbor’s high-pitched wail preceded her up the driveway. Her stick arms pumping, Ginny Ferguson powered up the hill at a forty-five-degree angle to the earth. She could be heard from out by the mailbox. Katherine walked out to meet her. She took Ginny’s hand and led her into the kitchen and sat her in Willis’s chair. Willis slinked off to the front room to read the paper.

  “Levon Ferguson has done it this time, Mizriz Juell. Goddamn bastard staggers home this morning, smelling like that shit-heel June Cahill’s cheap Evening in Paris shit perfume,” here the woman spat through clenched teeth, “and he hung my Clancy on the clothesline till that poor little dog thrashed his self to death.”

  Katherine Juell was not a woman who cursed, but she did not hold it against Virginia Ferguson for doing so. She believed there were women who had every reason to curse. Maureen had asked her mother once why swearing and taking the Lord’s name was okay for some and not for others. “Hands have been dealt to some women that look more like a foot,” Katherine had explained. She supported a woman’s right to leave a mean man, papal dispensation or no. “You can work with mad, but there’s not a whole lot you can do with mean,” was how she put it.

  So she kept her neighbor’s coffee cup filled and repeated the words “I know, Virginia,” the only two things the woman seemed to need. Virginia Ferguson was called Ginny by all but Katherine Juell. The way her mother clung to such formalities was a source of embarrassment to Maureen when people her own age were around, and of pride when they were not.

  Perched in her spying spot in the corner between the refrigerator and the window, Maureen opened the new red diary she had received for her birthday. It had a golden lock and key, and a little gold pen attached by a ribbon. May 24, 1969, she wrote. She watched the grownups go about their business. She wanted to be ready when adulthood struck. The annual pixie haircut Katherine administered at the beginning of each summer had given the girl the look of a trouble-seeking imp, dishwater blond bangs jutting from her forehead a good two inches above a single eyebrow. Maureen had complained bitterly that she was too old for such a baby-fied haircut, but Katherine shushed her, saying short hair made it easier to spot ticks, that if she weren’t such a tomboy, there would be options beyond the pixie.

  Little sore nubs chafed raw under the crop top of her new shorts set, even though her mother insisted she was not ready for a bra. Maureen worked not to stare at Ginny’s ponderous breasts and wondered whether she really did want such things plastered on the front of her. True, Ginny was expecting. Katherine had explained that a woman’s breasts swell as they get ready to feed a new baby. Ginny’s pillowing belly heaved under great sobs while her cheekbone took on an extraordinary shade of blue. Katherine gave Maureen the nod, and she hopped down from the stool and fetched ice and wrapped it in a tea towel for Ginny’s face. The woman’s hard-luck life never failed to fascinate Maureen, no matter how often its woe was wrung out in their kitchen, and how much the story remained unchanged. For her part, Maureen thought her parents never should have rented the old tenant house at the edge of their farm to Levon and Ginny Ferguson in the first place. But Katherine had taken one look at poor Ginny when they showed up on Juell Ridge that day and said yes before Willis even had the chance to think it over. Maureen had been sitting in the swing when Levon’s truck flew up the hill, and she saw him get out with something wadded in his fist. After they left she fetched it out of the ditch where Levon had thrown it—the For Rent sign Willis had taped to the window of the tenant house.

  Willis popped his head into the kitchen now as if checking for the all clear. “I ought to finish that order for Rafe Goins. I expect he’ll be here directly to pick it up,” he said, stepping into his coveralls.

  Maureen stuck her diary into the waistband of her shorts and followed her father across the yard to his shop. She ducked through its low-slung door and sucked in the lush air, the smells that belonged specifically to her father: pinewood and machine oil and red cedar and varnish. This was where her father made his living, machining mysterious parts of this and that from hunks of metal. But it was also where they worked on projects for the house, Maureen and Willis and Billy too, before he went off to the war. Whatnot shelves, magazine racks, ashtrays. She climbed into the driver’s seat of the old Hupmobile that had stood in the center of the shop for as long as she could remember. Willis’s uncle had left it to him, and over the years he had restored every i
nch of it, inside and out.

  “Can we take the Hupmobile out today?” Maureen said.

  “They’re calling for rain. No sense in chancing it.” Her father always cleaned and polished the old Victoria’s body after they drove around the countryside so that it gleamed like new.

  “Will we go to the parade for Harlan O’Brien and the dead boys?”

  “I’m not sure that is on your mother’s to-do list for today. It wouldn’t surprise me if they postpone it anyway. Storm’s coming.”

  Maureen sat down at the small workbench her father had built for Billy (she had laid claim to it after her brother left for the army), a scaled-down version of Willis’s own. She sanded the spurdle she was making for Katherine, a late Mother’s Day present that she hoped would be an even better surprise for being late, plus it might cheer her after the recent bad news. Her mother was against war. Well, maybe not war in general, but this war. When Katherine and Willis’s friends with sons in the Kentucky National Guard were notified that their boys’ unit was shipping out to Texas for training and then on to Vietnam, some of them were baffled and outraged. They had understood the Guard to be meant for emergencies close to home. Katherine had gone to Frankfort to protest with some of the parents, despite Willis’s efforts to talk his wife out of it. Maureen kept expecting Katherine to say to Willis, I told you so, but so far she hadn’t.

  She stopped sanding her Mother’s Day project and hovered at her father’s elbow, watching him drill tiny holes of progressively larger diameter into odd shapes of metal. She hopped from one foot to the other and waited for him to turn off the drill and take off his mufflers and safety goggles and look at her.