“Sounds good,” he says. He sets the muddy boots outside the kitchen door and walks in his socked feet upstairs.
Katherine and Willis and Maureen stand there and listen for the sound of the shower overhead, the trickle of water as it rains down the drainpipe in the walls. Then all three break pose and go on about their business, Willis peeling out of the coveralls that are his second skin during work hours, Katherine breaking up the meatloaf with her bare hands and working in some oregano and forming it into balls. Maureen chews on a radish.
Later Willis will grumble about his son spending all his time at Pekkar’s, blowing what pittance he earns from yard work on Millionaires’ Row. When Billy first got home nobody thought much about the frequency of his visits to Pekkar’s Alley. He was catching up with friends, he deserved some time to relax. They watched as it went from a few times a week to every night.
But for now, the five of them, this newly reconfigured family, sit together and pass the platters of salad and garlic bread and meatballs and spaghetti, and the conversation skims above the surface of the table. Katherine’s lips tremble with fragile contentment. Maureen expects any second for Willis to fuss at Billy for coming to the table shirtless. But her father instead asks Billy how it was working for the late Evelyn Slidell. Did she trail after him, ordering him around? Did she have him trim her boxwood maze with fingernail scissors, as rumor had it?
“Not after she took to her bed,” Billy says. Since the old woman died, he’s been doing yard work for Uncle Judge and the Duvalls and anyone else who will hire him.
Katherine continues to smile. None of her family’s uncomfortable conversation matches her face.
Carl, seeming to note the effort the family is making, injects something barely audible into the conversation and Maureen asks him several times to repeat it. She snorts when her uncle grows agitated and turns over a glass of milk.
“Maureen!” Katherine says. “If you can’t be civil, please excuse yourself.” This is mother-speak for Go to your room. They both know it, but Maureen tries to pretend that the order is lost on her. She doesn’t want to miss anything. Under her father’s glare, she finally pushes her chair from the table and leaves the kitchen.
Upstairs, instead of going to her own room, Maureen sits on Billy’s bed and waits. She runs her fingers across the spines of the LPs lining the shelves he assembled from bricks and two-by-twelve planks. They form a U-shape around his bed, walling it in like a cave of hard rock. The records are perfectly alphabetized, from the Beatles, the Jeff Beck Group, and Cream to the Rolling Stones, Steppenwolf, the Who, and the Zombies. She picks out one she’s never seen before. The name of the band, Iron Butterfly, calls to mind some bizarre combination of medieval torture device and mechanical insect. She holds the vinyl disk by its sides, her fingers straight, the way she’s seen her brother do, and places it gently on the turntable. The volume is all the way down, and she turns it up just enough to hear the words, deep and thrilling. Oh, won’t you come with me, says the scary voice, so male and strange it runs a current through her. The song keeps going, seemingly without end.
When he comes in, she thinks at first that her brother doesn’t even register her presence. Billy yanks a fresh shirt from his dresser drawer and pulls it over his head. He cranks the stereo to ten. Maureen can feel the vibrations of her eardrums—matching the beats of the drummer, now playing alone. The song, amazingly, is still “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”
“Man, I am getting wasted tonight!” Billy shouts over the music without looking at her, and slaps cologne on his cheeks. His hair has grown over his ears. She watches this stranger in her brother’s body and can’t think of a thing to say.
Then he is gone.
“Wasted!” she repeats to herself, and she wonders what that feels like.
APPARENTLY CARL HAS DECIDED THAT Maureen is his favorite Juell. He has taken to following her around all day, and whenever he starts to get on her nerves, she reminds herself that he has lost all the friends he had at the nuthouse. He wanders around the yard, the house, an odd shoe looking for its mate.
She set her alarm this morning to start working early on her memoirs. She has taken to working outside at the new picnic table they bought with the insurance money from the May storm damage. She tiptoed past Billy’s room—not that he would hear her, dead to the world till noon anyhow—and she stopped in the kitchen to smear peanut butter and molasses on a couple of last night’s biscuits before heading outside. And who was already out there?
Uncle Carl, of course, standing at the very tip-edge of the bluff hanging above the valley. It wasn’t even all the way light yet. Maureen cleared her throat and he jumped and she realized too late that he wasn’t just admiring the last stars or the twinkling lights on the cement plant but was privately peeing, him all rushing to put his thing away. She pretended she didn’t see diddly-squat.
After a polite minute, “I love dawn,” she said.
Carl said, “I love the red angels best.” He talked in this mysterious whisper without a lot of ups and downs in his voice, which Maureen judged the best thing about him. “We had lots of those at Eastern State.”
“That’s good,” Maureen said, nodding. She found herself nodding at most of what her uncle said, because often it was hard to tell what was crazy and what was just really smart. People said smarts were what drove him crazy, but her mother calls that nonsense.
Carl went on studying the sky, moving his eyes in a circle like he was following a moth’s path. Maureen headed to the picnic table, knowing he would follow her. She spread her papers out. She was writing on loose leaf now. When she and Katherine went to the store to replace the diary that had been ruined by the storm, she had decided at the last minute that cute diaries with a lock and key were for little kids. She picked out instead a serious-looking three-ring binder and a thick pack of college-ruled paper and a Sheaffer cartridge pen with three prefilled cartridges in blue, black, and red. It was in that moment, standing in J.J. Newberry’s, that Maureen realized childish scribbles in a diary were not what she wanted to be writing at all.
She was a girl who’d been “touched,” Adelaide Ricketts had told her. Katherine would be horrified to learn that Maureen and Eddie had been sneaking off to visit the root doctor. They always dismounted their bikes and pushed them up the steep woodland path, hiding them in the dense growth near Granny Ricketts’s falling-in cabin. Maureen got a queasy feeling in her gut remembering how, after she had told the old woman about the lightning strike and the death of Curly, everything went blank and Maureen’s hair seemed to be newly electrified from the roots out. That had to count for something, didn’t it, being touched? But that seemed ages ago, since Granny Ricketts put the blessing on her, and Maureen still waited for her special powers to make themselves known.
At the top of a new clean page she wrote: Chapter 3.
Carl stood behind her, breathing the same way her father did, stiff little hairs wheezing and complaining at the brink of his nostrils.
“You can’t stand back there, Uncle Carl,” she said.
He sat across the table from her. “What are you writing?” he whispered in the creepy voice that she hoped none of the popular girls at school would ever hear.
“It’s a combination memoir and history of Cementville.”
“Why?”
“Because I find life interesting, my life, I mean. At least I plan for it to be. Someday. If it goes on this way much longer I am going to have to off myself.” Maureen figured her personal life could not become duller, although thus far the only special power she had been granted from the lightning bolt appeared to be the ability to make her uncle stick to her like gum on the sole of a shoe.
But she was heartened by the thought that Cementville was getting more interesting and stranger every day. First, not long after all the soldiers had been buried, people were in a thrall of gossip about Augrey Ferguson who, so the story went, had begun working as a maid, which would not have set off any alarms in
itself, except the person whose house was being cleaned and whose food was being cooked was an old colored man, Nimrod Grebe. And that’s not all, people said; near as anyone could tell, she was doing it for free.
Then something way bigger happened, two weeks ago. Jimmy Smith’s wife had allegedly been murdered. Maureen asked her mother why the Picayune still said “allegedly” when everybody in town knew about the gash in her skull and the purple bruises all around her neck (thanks to the big mouth of Roddy Duvall, who had seen the body before Tommy Thompson’s autopsy). But instead of answering her, Katherine had snatched the newspaper out of Maureen’s hands and thrown it in the trash.
Rumors were thick as pokeweed around town. Levon Ferguson had been questioned after several witnesses reported him making belligerent statements about the dead woman both before and after the discovery of her body. The sheriff had also picked up some of the GIs who came home in the last few months, as well as a few strangers who had been hired on at the new factory. Somebody said they even took Jimmy Smith in, which Willis said was ridiculous because a blind man could see he was nuts about his wife and torn to pieces over his loss. Willis said he would sooner believe the mother-in-law, Vera Smith, had done it before he would suspect Jimmy. Katherine swatted him with the classified section and rolled her eyes across the breakfast dishes at where Maureen sat scraping the last of the scrambled eggs from her plate.
Between what Maureen got from Eddie Miller and from eavesdropping on her parents’ conversations and the rare snippets Billy brought home from Pekkar’s Alley, people were behaving like a bunch of bees whose honeycombs had been ransacked by an enormous bear.
“Yes, I will just off myself,” Maureen repeated now, looking at her big uncle across the picnic table. She reddened, suddenly remembering the newest secret she had uncovered: Her grandfather really had offed himself (this being the new term she had learned for suicide). Her parents would have been shocked to find out Maureen was aware of this dark family secret. Who knew that her family even had dark family secrets?
Ginny Ferguson had accidentally told her all about it the other day, when Katherine made Maureen walk Ginny home from the latest crying jag in their kitchen. This tearful episode was brought on by rumors that the clodhopper Ginny was married to was a suspect in Giang Smith’s death, which Maureen would not have doubted for a second. “Ain’t Mizriz Ferguson already had enough heartache?” Ginny sniveled as Maureen escorted her down the Juell driveway to the tenant cabin where Ginny and Levon lived, occasionally even at the same time. “What with burying her boy Daniel and all? And what about me, ’bout to drop this baby—I don’t know how much more of this stress I can take!” Maureen reminded her that she had vowed three times since Easter alone to leave Levon for good, and Ginny came close to slapping her. “It ain’t like you Juells got nothing to be ashamed of!” Ginny said with a hot vengeance that seemed to surprise Ginny herself as much as it did Maureen. And in the fluster that often was the only way Ginny could communicate, she spilled it all, some confused rigmarole that took Maureen a few minutes to unravel, about Carl and some dead hobo. “And that’s what caused your granddaddy to tie a rope around his neck and string himself up in y’all’s barn!”
Maureen wasn’t sure whether her heart skipped a beat or sped up. She was both thrilled and appalled that such a thing had happened in her own family. She thought back to the middle of May, before the dead boys had come home, when her red diary was brand new and she had a hard time coming up with two sentences at a time that were exciting enough to put down there. She’d been resigned to the fact that nothing of an astonishing nature had ever or would ever occur to anyone in Cementville, much less to her own kin. And now she was the granddaughter of an actual suicide! Before this, Maureen had known only that Willis was off in the Korean War when his father passed away. She asked Ginny in a hushed voice if it was Carl who’d found him hanging from the rafters. “Oh, Lord! Please don’t tell your mama I told you!” Ginny cried and hurried into her house and slammed the door. Maureen had stood a long time in the middle of the road. Was that what had driven her uncle off the deep end all those years ago? Coming across his father swinging at the end of a rope? It certainly sounded like the sort of thing that might end up with a person getting locked away in an insane asylum.
Here her uncle sat, staring at a curving line of ants making their way across the picnic table between them.
“I thought somebody should write a history of Cementville, you know, because of what a nice place it is,” Maureen said to Carl now, and did not add, Or was, until this bizarre summer. In truth she wasn’t sure if she was writing a history or a novel or a memoir or what, only that big things were happening, and it did not appear as if any of the adults around this town were capable of making sense of it all. She tried to rub out the sharply alternating mental images of the crumpled form of a woman lying on a rocky riverbank and a dark shape (someone she only knew from faded photographs) swinging from a hayloft. She wanted it both ways: the breathless excitement of strange events and the good place she knew too, like an old coat that fits right and belongs to you.
“Don’t you think people ought to know about what a good place it is, Uncle Carl? The story of how our town got here and everything?” she persisted, unsure whether she was trying to convince her uncle or herself of the truth of it.
“What if nobody wants to know about what a good place it is. What if they already have their own good place and they’re afraid knowing about another good place will make their place disappear?” Carl asked.
“Well then, they shouldn’t read anything if they’re so afraid of having their minds changed,” Maureen said. What she had started to say was, This book will be for normal people, Uncle Carl. Her mother had reminded her several times since Carl’s arrival that it pays to think before you speak.
He wiped his eyes. Small sucking sounds came from the back of his throat. Maureen was learning it did not take much to get her uncle going. She really should not have mentioned offing herself.
“Maybe I’m writing it for us,” she said with a cheer she did not feel. “Just think. When it gets published, it’ll be like a version of home you can take with you if you ever have to leave again. Say you’re living in Indiana, or Paris, and you start to feel homesick. You can pull out my book and flip to a chapter and say, Oh, I remember that!”
“I’m a native of Cementville, too.”
“I know, Uncle Carl.” She pretended to study a brochure about Mammoth Cave that she had picked up the week before on a research run at the Cementville Tourism Bureau, which was basically a folding table at the bus station where Vera Smith sat behind a rack of brochures about things to do when you were visiting the area. There was a brochure about the distillery, and the Palisades on the Kentucky River, and one about the Tourmobile. But most of the things to do were in other parts of the state. She offered a biscuit to Carl.
He took a tiny bite, wiped his fingers on his pant leg, and opened one of the travel brochures. “Since the day I got taken away I’ve been a visitor here forty-five times,” Carl said.
Maureen glanced up. “Forty-five?”
“Thirty years old now, minus fifteen years when I got taken away, equals fifteen years I lived at Eastern State, times three visits a year—Thanksgiving, Christmas, Fourth of July—equals forty-five visits.”
Maureen remembered Uncle Carl turning up at certain times and was vaguely aware that the relatives took turns having him sit at their holiday table. He was the hot potato that had to be passed around and couldn’t stay in anybody’s hands too long.
“What about Easter?” she asked.
He made a face like he could not believe what she had said. “And miss the Easter egg hunt.”
She nodded. “So you were a little older than me when you moved away.”
“I didn’t move away.” Carl wiped both eyes at once with his big fingers.
“When you were taken away.” Maureen tried to picture herself bundled in a white straight
jacket, her parents loading her into a van full of strange men, Katherine and Willis and Billy standing at the top of the driveway, waving goodbye to her. Or taking her to spooky old Eastern State Hospital themselves and walking out the front doors without her, then driving home singing along to Pee Wee King on the radio, no different than if they had just hauled cast-off clothing to Appalachia for the annual Holy Ghost Charity Drive.
She filled one sheet of loose leaf and set it aside. Carl picked it up and looked it over and placed it exactly as he had found it.
“Did you put in about the murder?” he whispered.
“Mother said I need to stop dwelling on what happened to Giang Smith.”
“The other one,” Carl said.
“She says I have a morbid sensibility, and if I don’t stop it, she’s going to take me to see a doctor.” Maureen’s work would get nowhere today if she indulged every crazy idea clattering around inside her addlepated uncle. That was another new term she had learned. Addlepated: being mixed-up. Confused.
The two of them sat out there at the picnic table, Maureen writing, Carl squashing ants with his big fat thumb anytime one ventured near her stacks of papers and brochures. To give him something productive to do, Maureen handed him a red pencil and let him read over the first chapter. All the while he made little throat noises she could not decipher as agreement or disapproval.
When she studied her notes later, she found not red pencil marks, but a parade of ant bodies scattered across the pages like tiny pressed flowers.
THE NEXT DAY, WHILE KATHERINE was lying down for a rare nap, Maureen fastened her book bag onto her handlebars. Her mother had been acting more protective than Maureen could remember, hesitating to allow her to ride her bike to town or even over to the Millers’ house. Maureen knew it was because of Giang Smith’s murder and the fact that the sheriff had been questioning people but no actual arrest had been made. But she had been cooped up on their ridge for six days in a row, and she had work to do, and summer was slipping away. She wasn’t sure which was stronger, the twinge of guilt at sneaking off while her mother napped, or the fear of what would happen when she got home.
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