Cementville

by Paulette Livers

  He sits like a starved saint at the far end of the stage. That O’Brien boy, or man, really—what—twenty-nine, thirty now. Confetti from the parade still litters the shoulders of his uniform like colored flakes of snow. Lemuel and Lila O’Brien look like they don’t know whether to weep with joy or run for their lives. They are eyeing their son as if they are not convinced he isn’t an imposter.

  —We must have the courage to live as a nation under God, as our founders did when they forged our country nearly two centuries ago. And so let resound the rallying cry: Long live God’s great democracy, the United States of America!

  THE CROWD PARTS DOWN THE middle, Red Sea-style, to let pass the families of the fallen, trying but unable to keep their heads down, compelled to stare into the wretched faces as if hoping for inoculation against sorrow. Evelyn will be the last to leave the stage, and while she waits her eyes trace the horizon, the cleft where her ancestors, and the forebears of most of the people here at this scroungy park, scrambled across the Appalachians and into this valley. The history of this place, and the name into which she married, is like the weight of a great ugly bauble hung about her neck.

  He was a Baltimore man, that first Slidell, and the people milling about below Evelyn now are the direct descendants of the men and women William Slidell dragged here with him, a retinue of masons, craftsmen, and servants. (Not slaves, Evelyn’s late husband would have noted, but freedmen of color, decorated with new liberty on the eve of the journey, a source or a product of the pomposity against which William Slidell is said to have struggled.) Also a wife, three daughters, and a son, and two thousand in silver. The state’s first governor had signed over to William Slidell the better part of this stretch of river basin, one of many deep cradles hanging in the ragged breaches of the Mississippian seabed. This entourage formed the front flank of the Catholic exodus out of Maryland, descendants of Jacobites who had fled England. The land was beautiful, if a bit hillier than the newcomers might have wished. Dense with woods and full of game. Rocky too, being a quilt of deposits from the ages, riddled with shale and limestone, petrified mussels, corals, and trilobites, the fossilized remains of sea creatures. Every square foot of alluvial bottomland they freed of stone yielded not just good farmland but the building blocks for walls to separate cows from crops, kitchen garden from a sheep or goat’s unceasing appetite. Those walls still stand, most of them, lining the roads that have not changed routes in two centuries.

  “Won’t you let me buy you all lunch?” Evelyn says as the four of them make their slow way through the crowd to Martha Goins’s car. Martha nods, wiping her nose. Maria Louise and her companion are silent. “Say, did you see that child down front flirting with those boys? If I were her mother—” Evelyn stops short, remembering that Byard is a child of that same mother. No doubt the others in the car are now busily imagining how someone of her standing and age and wisdom would handle such carnality in her own child. None of them offers a rejoinder. Evelyn swivels around toward the two in the backseat, ready to offer an apology. She is startled to find Byard Ferguson glaring at her.

  “Happy’s or Hungarian Gardens?” Martha says. Evelyn has not yet heard an opinion on this new place. That Cementville would have a Hungarian restaurant of all things—this world has not ceased to surprise her. Her vote is for the devil she knows.

  MaLou blurts suddenly from the backseat, “I have to say I think it’s terrible how there was not a single mention of Daniel.”

  “Daniel?” Martha says sweetly.

  “Byard’s brother Daniel died last week in Vietnam too. He was on night patrol in a whole other part of that shitty place. Where do they get off not even reading his name in the roll call? How do you think Arlene felt, came out today expecting the support of her community, and all the other parents there on the stage—sorry, Aunt Martha—and Arlene has nobody but her sister there by her side? The fucking government drafted him—didn’t even give him a choice! God, how I hate this place!”

  Martha keeps her eyes on the road. The girl cannot stop herself.

  “They haven’t even buried him yet,” she wails. “Duvall said his funeral home was all booked up.”

  The boy folds the girl into his arms and she is sobbing into his clean white shirt—or Rafe’s shirt, more likely, Evelyn thinks; it swallows this lanky young man.

  “Shush now. We’ll bury him this week,” the Ferguson boy says. “Mr. Duvall is doing everything he can. It’ll be all right.”

  Evelyn does not know MaLou well enough to know if she is always this dramatic, but if what the girl says is true, she makes a solid point. Evelyn will have to get Martha to dig out last week’s Picayune to see if there is mention of a dead Ferguson. She thought she had clipped everything related to the war. Her own personal scrapbook of atrocities.

  The restaurant parking lot at Happy’s is packed. The parade and memorial service seem to have created something of a weirdly festive atmosphere in town.

  “You know, Byard and I might go on,” MaLou says, tipping her head toward Pekkar’s Alley down the street. Evelyn cranes her neck and sees some of the local youth already malingering around the door of the vile joint. Levon Ferguson leans against the wall with a plastic cup in one hand, cigarette in the other. Evelyn is glad Lewis is not alive to see this place. Yes, he made whiskey for a living, a very handsome living, but to his death her husband considered bourbon the drink of gentlemen, not something to be consumed till a person groveled in the road, vomiting and retching and behaving in ways to which no civilized human being should ever stoop.

  But MaLou is not her niece. Evelyn keeps her lip buttoned.

  “I think I’m out of the notion too, Mrs. Slidell,” Martha says. She fishes a Hershey bar out of the glove compartment for Evelyn, but Evelyn shakes her head. Martha opens it anyway, breaks off several squares, and lays it on the car seat between them.

  What Evelyn had wanted was to walk into that restaurant and let people see her sitting rod straight, enjoying herself over a hearty lunch with the handsome young couple and the well-liked Martha Goins. She would have taken off her sunglasses and smiled at everyone so they could see that she is very much alive, and she is a person who still knows what it means to be a goddamn pillar of the community. And just as quickly there is a little caving in, right there behind her breastbone, with the surprising knowledge: She does not want to be forgotten. Not before she is dead anyway.

  “Let’s drive out a ways,” Evelyn says to Martha after they drop MaLou and Byard at Pekkar’s Alley. Evelyn doesn’t blame the kids for craving a drink, after that speech of Freeman’s. Her own mind wanders to the crystal decanter on the sideboard at home.

  “I can’t think of a thing I’d rather do,” Martha says, and Evelyn believes she means it. She is surprised almost every day that Martha Goins, whose heart is big and innocent as a child’s, is actually fond of her. Evelyn can feel it in her nurse’s voice when she blusters in through the front door and sings her arrival up the stairwell, or when she makes a simple lunch for them to share on the screened porch. It is an undeserved grace that has been conferred upon her, that Martha left her job as school nurse and wanted to come take care of an old woman for several hours a day.

  “Where shall we go?” Martha says. Her voice is sunny enough to almost hide the tremor in it. Evelyn sees that she is silently crying. She doesn’t know whether to offer her nurse another hanky or let the woman grieve in peace. A tear rolls down Martha’s quivering chin and onto her shelf-like breast.

  “I haven’t been out Crooked Creek since I don’t know when,” says Evelyn.

  They pass through the center of the distillery’s sprawling campus. Its big windowless warehouses flattened against the sky always remind Evelyn of blank-faced prison barracks. Stanley’s father enjoyed parading out-of-town visitors through the grounds. He started what he called the Tourmobile, charged them a half-dollar apiece to be driven around town in a fancy wagon with a tasseled awning, pulled behind a tractor piloted by some high school b
oy or other. She can still hear the slow, comforting murmur of Lewis’s voice (God help her, how it would melt her from the inside!) welcoming the tourists as he dipped a cup into the tank of sour mash and sniffed its earthy aroma as if it were nectar of the gods. “Smells like money!” Lewis would say, and it always got a laugh out of the group. The tour ended at the sampling room, where the ladies would roll their eyes at their husbands and warn them not to overdo.

  In a blink Martha’s car is well up Crooked Creek Road and entering Taylortown. Local lore had it that, after a first rough winter, William Slidell’s ragtag band of pioneers began to prosper, and Slidell saw his way to apportioning to the people he referred to in his journals as his Negroes their own corner of land behind his burgeoning distillery at the south end of the new settlement. The road narrows here, crowded on both sides with honey locust and arrow-wood scrub and the stinking ailanthus trees that threaten to colonize the whole valley. Their weedy limbs are strewn about the road, casualties of the recent storms.

  Evelyn glances up where Adelaide Ricketts’s place still haunts the ridge. What was it Faulkner said? The past is never dead. It isn’t even past—something to that effect.

  Adelaide. Now there was old. The woods around the two-room shack have grown even thicker, if that is possible, and Evelyn wonders if someday they won’t find Adelaide cold and dead in there, strangled in vines, her bony spine bent over some cauldron of herbs. Adelaide averred that her people were here before any of the rest. Claimed to be Cherokee, although everybody who cared about tracing such things knew she was some percentage blend of Negro and plain old English. When people called Adelaide a witch, she never failed to put them right. “Root doctor,” she would lisp with a gummy smile. Then she’d hold out a hand that resembled more a bundle of twigs and wait for the few coins she required to tell a fortune. Evelyn herself had spent time and money, years back, at Adelaide Ricketts’s shack.

  They pass the stooped figure of Jesse Greathouse trundling down the road. Martha slows the car to let a mangy hound struggle out of the middle of the road and creep into the ditch. Is everybody in Taylortown ancient now? Evelyn wonders. But there is Bett Ferguson, unfazed by being one of several whites living in what most still think of as the Negro section. Bett is sitting out on her front porch with that passel of children, one crying on the steps, another in a tree, two or three more running around the yard in dirty drawers. She and her sister Arlene must be well into their late forties by now, which to Evelyn is not old anymore. Bett is still wearing her nice dress from the parade and service, but she has kicked off her shoes and is rubbing one foot, her big white thigh gleaming. It’s a good thing Civil Rights came along and they could stop calling this place Coloredtown. Bett’s brood is probably the youngest lot here, as so many of the younger blacks have shoved off to parts north where jobs might wait for them in Chicago and Detroit.

  Bett waves as they pass by. At Martha, Evelyn is sure.

  “Stop the car,” Evelyn says suddenly, and Martha pulls over so close to the brushy side of the road that limbs scratch against the window glass. She follows Evelyn’s gaze to the porch of Nimrod’s house, where he sits dozing in the shadows, his downy head resting on his chest. He probably got a ride home with Bett.

  “Did you want to pay him a visit?”

  “Oh, no! No,” Evelyn says. Although wasn’t that the reason she wanted to drive out Crooked Creek to begin with? Surely not, because now, seeing the old man—who is a stranger to her, really—Evelyn cannot imagine she actually believed they would sit together and have a nice long chat, that he would take her hand and pat it and they would spend the afternoon exchanging remember-whens. The top of his silver head almost glows in the shade of the porch.

  “I’m sorry, Martha,” Evelyn says, “I thought for a minute I left something back there on the stage, but I must have been mistaken.” She stares straight ahead as Martha pulls slowly into the road. She does not let herself turn to look at him, or wait for him to raise his head.

  AT HOME, SHE LETS MARTHA help her out of her things. She watches the woman hang her dress in a zipper bag. Evelyn has taken to keeping everything zipped—moths were so thick last summer, they would have eaten her out of house and home if she weren’t vigilant. The day has taken it out of her, and Evelyn asks Martha to bring lunch up, rather than eating in the dining room. While the nurse is downstairs, she pulls a box out of the bureau and opens it onto her bed. It is stuffed to bulging with crumbling papers and photographs she hauled down from the attic last fall when she still had her strength. There are things she needs to see today.

  At the top is the Slidell family Bible, the same allegedly carried from the shores of England across the ocean by the first to come to Lord Baltimore’s wild Maryland shore in 1690. Who is there now to question the mythology surrounding those early ancestors? Her boy Stanley was the last of them, and he cared nothing for dusty history. Look who he married, running off to Gatlinburg with Johnny Ferguson’s girl, Loretta.

  Oh, how Evelyn had raged when she learned what Stanley had done! It physically hurt her, him throwing everything away. If there was anything to the transmigration of souls, the comings and goings of the dead and the reborn, her boy came awfully close to running into the soul of his homely infant daughter, skinny squalling thing of two or three weeks when Stanley fell into his permanent sleep in the backseat of Buck Farber’s coupe. That Wanda. It was as if the girl was born to intentionally irk Evelyn. Her granddaughter is a spinster, rocking her way to early decrepitude there on Johnny Ferguson’s scrap of land.

  Evelyn rubs circles around the spot on her breastbone where her breath is always catching. She flips through the front pages of the Bible where three hundred years of names are recorded in faded ink. She pictures the joyous occasions, all the different hands that scrawled across the page the names of newborns. Some occasions were not joyous—for too many, the days between birth and death can be tallied on one hand.

  The name right above Stanley’s at the bottom is her own little Eugenia. The baby was so perfect, on the outside. The doctor said he did not know how Evelyn herself had lived through the horrific birth, and Evelyn said, when Lewis was out of the room, that she wished she had not.

  The old names were beautiful though. Her favorite is Jacoba Clementina, first-born daughter here in the New World, named for the deposed James II. The story goes that Arnold, that original Slidell to make the passage, was such an ardent Jacobite he tried to incorporate some variant of the king’s name into the names of all his children. One of the Slidell women somewhere along the way had tried to write it all down, how Arnold Slidell had fled with other supporters of the Catholic Stuarts and had gained the patronage of the High Sheriff in Maryland, Lord Henry Darnall. Arnold was probably responsible for that entrepreneurial spirit that kept the Slidells on top of the heap down through the generations. Evelyn must locate the journals where all that was recorded. She hasn’t seen those volumes in a long time, but they must be somewhere in the attic. So much junk—clothes and jewelry and more moldy books and papers. Mice and snakes too, harmless black snakes who’ve found shelter and a steady supply of food. Evelyn no longer minds knowing they are up there.

  Something slips from the pages of the crumbling Bible, and when Martha comes into the room carrying the lunch tray, Evelyn is in bed reading the original yellowed front page of The Slidellville Picayune, which had first come off the press in April of 1861, in time to announce the secession from the Union of neighboring Virginia.

  “Will you look at that!” Martha says. “Where in the world did you come across that old thing?” She pulls down the folding legs on the bed tray and sets it across Evelyn’s lap.

  “This family throws away nothing.” Evelyn hands Martha the fragile clipping, already cracking where it has been creased for a century.

  “What I always wondered was why they’d name a newspaper something so silly.”

  “Oh, I think they had in mind the nickel price. They certainly weren’t thinking t
he news they published dealt in the trivial,” Evelyn says, buttering the cornbread Martha made yesterday. She feels bad that Martha has taken just one day off since she received news of her Donald’s death. Evelyn told her to take as much time as she needed, that there were other women around town who would fill in for her. But Martha insisted that sitting at home alone was the last thing she wanted.

  “If there’s nothing else, Mrs. Slidell, I’m going to go on home and see about Rafe.”

  Evelyn waves her off, but at the bedroom door Martha stops.

  “I know it’s going to take time, but other than the funeral I don’t think Rafe has left the house in six days.” She looks at the floor. “You’ve walked this walk, Evelyn. Is there any advice you can think of? Anything I can say to Rafe? Or do for him?”

  The look on Martha Goins’s face is of such wretchedness, Evelyn’s mind goes blank for a moment. What is it Martha is asking of her? Surely she does not expect Evelyn to say: You will be all right. Your husband will become again the contented man you knew. You will return to enjoying his company across the supper table and card games with your friends. Evelyn Slidell is not given to platitudes, knowing from experience that most of them are lies other people will tell you for their own comfort. She may be the town’s ogress, but she is not a liar.

  The cornbread in her mouth is dry as dirt, and she gulps at her tea to get it down. “Mr. Slidell was long in the ground before our Stanley passed.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot. You went through that all alone. I am so sorry.”

  Evelyn is about to let her leave, then, “No, no, Martha, it’s me who is sorry. I have not said all week how sorry I am about Donnie Ray.”

  “Yes, you did—”

  But she stops her, stops this large-hearted woman’s protestations, and Evelyn Slidell gives to Martha Goins the lies she needs.

  AFTER THE DOOR IN THE hall downstairs clicks shut, Evelyn sets the dinner tray aside and returns to her box. She riffles through several diaries and disintegrating albums of snapshots until she stops at a large, blurry photograph. It is a spring day, the weather not unlike what swept through the valley last weekend. A blustery wind plasters the women’s long dark dresses to their legs. The sky behind the buildings looks ominous. There she is, Evelyn herself, at five or six years old, near the front, partly obscured by her father. She is wearing a white pinafore, and Lewis, holding onto her hand, is beside her in a dark suit with short pants. They glare out at the camera together, Lewis and Evelyn versus the world. The men all stand with their hands clasped behind their backs or arms folded, all their faces pointing in one direction. It is the beginning of a new era for the town. Evelyn’s father, the Vice President of the new operation, has stepped aside to make way for Melburn Slidell, Lewis’s father, who is cutting the ribbon on the gates of his spanking-new cement plant. For the next century the main ingredient for modern building would be churned and ground and belched and breathed into the very lungs, powdering the pores, clothing, food, and even the roots of people’s hair. To celebrate the town entering the industrial age, they changed the name to Cementville in an extravagant ceremony meant to sanctify it with prosperity. It is this that the photograph documents. All the men not engaged in farming or whiskey-making found jobs with Slidell Cement.