Cementville

by Paulette Livers

  “He’s not charged with any crime,” Willis says. “Not yet, anyway.” And when Katherine shoots him a look, he amends it. “Nobody seriously thinks Harlan did anything, Billy. They’re going to catch the real murderer. Eventually.”

  “They killed him, Mama. They’ve done killed him this time for good.”

  “Who? What do you mean, Billy?” Katherine still believes this is just another drunken tirade, more of the haunts that have plagued her son since they tossed him back to her from some far hell.

  “Harley’s hung himself.” Billy grabs the whiskey bottle and tries to drain it, but Carl wrests it from him.

  “Sweet Jesus!” Katherine hears herself whisper, a sound that seems to come from somewhere else. Carl rocks, patting Billy’s shoulder.

  “Too late to help their savior hero now. I think I’m going to be sick, Mama.” Katherine can’t move quickly enough, and Billy vomits on the floor.

  She helps her son up the stairs. He vomits again into the toilet, then sits on the floor and watches her draw a hot bath. He lets her undress him and put him in the tub like a helpless child. She lathers a washrag, soaps him up. Here is her firstborn, leaning his head against the tub rim and closing his eyes while she shampoos his hair. She washed him with such care when he was a baby, and Willis did too, so tenderly, careful not to get water in his ears. How had they failed him? How had they let their boy go off and wade through a jungle full of people angry at an invading hostile force, people who would not hesitate to kill her son? He had avoided death only to come back to her unreachable.

  His mother swaddles him in a towel and leads him to bed and covers his shivering nakedness. This may be the first, this moment of openness, when she really sees what has come home to her, a boy who is not yet a man but is already as broken as any man with decades behind him. She kneels by him. Night fills the whole window at the foot of his bed, the sky black and unlit by any moon. A darkness she could give over to now; she could pull herself and her loved ones out into nothing, like Peter Pan leading the children off to Neverland. It’s no more a fantasy than the belief she has held onto the whole of this awful summer, the faith that her love is all the healing her son needs, that the practical tools of merciful time and patience and home cooking will whittle and mold and shape him back to the young man he was. There is no Neverland beyond that darkness. Outside the boundaries of their farm, outside the walls of knobs that divide their valley from the rest of the world, there are very real demons waiting to match wits with the devils who have taken up residence in Billy’s mind. She kneels beside her son’s bed, willing him to sleep, waiting for his breathing to even out. She rises, but he calls out, clings to her housecoat.

  “I can’t close my eyes, Mama. I see him hanging there, like some kind of Judas.”

  “Billy, why were you at the jail?”

  “I wanted to try . . . nobody was there to take care of him.”

  She does not say to her son, And you thought you could, in your condition? She has run out of ways to beg him to stop destroying himself.

  “I knew O’D would fall asleep, Mama. He always does.”

  Billy should know. Willis had refused to bail him out after the first two times he was arrested this summer, then insisted they keep him for a few days. Drunk and disorderly.

  Katherine tries to remember the song she used to sing, before Maureen was born, when it was just the two of them. How did it go?

  “Harlan already paid. That wasn’t right, Mama. Something’s gotta be done.”

  “We can’t do anything for him tonight, honey.” Sleep, little baby. It’s coming back: And when you wake, you’ll have cake, and all the pretty little horses. No, that was the song Maureen loved; she had wanted a horse. Why had Katherine and Willis never gotten her one? They had the land for it, after all. Another failing.

  Then the thought fills her: Lem and Lila could do nothing for Harlan, and neither could she do anything more for Billy. She couldn’t, but there might be others who could. Tomorrow, after she takes flowers and food to the O’Briens, she will call the veterans hospital and find out what she needs to do to get help for her own. Flowers. Food. A phone call. She can do this. She will.

  She brushes Billy’s forehead, sings the Pretty Horses song, even over his muttering. She stops when he says,

  “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t come back.”

  WHEN KATHERINE CRAWLS INTO BED next to her husband, she knows within a few minutes that he is feigning sleep. She curls around him and he relaxes into her. Things had been hard for both of them, father and son, since Billy came home from the war. Whatever anger she had held toward her husband, she wills it now to scatter, to leave her home and her family, to take its menacing pall and go. Something a Congregational minister had taught her as a young girl in Connecticut, when she still prayed, comes to her. Let me sow peace, the prayer went, or something along those lines. Where there is darkness, light. It comes to her, and she finds herself whispering the bits as they float in her mind.

  “What?” Willis whispers back and pulls her to him and squeezes her hard.

  “What’s happened to us, Will? Maybe Maureen’s right. It’s as though this town has been invaded by something, like it’s a different version of itself with the same tree-lined streets, the same quaint stores, the railroad, the picturesque river rolling through. But the old way, our way of seeing, it’s all gone. I don’t think we’re ever going to get it back.”

  Willis inhales his wife’s hair. “Our Mo is a smart one. But she’s a child, Katherine. A little girl with a big imagination.” He is wide awake now; Katherine can feel in his arms the strength, the contained love, the treasured and sometimes frightened part of him that he reserves for her.

  “Our Mo starts eighth grade next week, Papa. She isn’t a little girl anymore.”

  “You know what I mean. She lets her stories get away from her.”

  Katherine tries to lie still. Willis needs sleep. She needs sleep. It’s no good.

  “I hope Lila will be all right. This is going to be hard on her. She and Lem had nearly come to accept that they might not ever see Harley again, and then when they did get him back . . .” She feels her husband’s breath on her neck as it returns to its even, low hum. She hears the whistling of the bristly nostril hairs, singing their blissful refusal to the day and its vicissitudes.

  “Will,” she says, one last time. “I will need you to go with me tomorrow. We’re taking Billy to the hospital.”

  SIXTEEN

  MaLou does not wake when Byard stumbles in at two. He strips out of his wet clothes, washes his teeth with a finger, and gargles a splash of the nasty Listerine his wife keeps on the dresser, gagging softly and swallowing it, before slipping in next to her, careful not to jostle the bed. Her aunt and uncle, Martha and Rafe Goins, have been beyond generous, letting Byard and MaLou stay in their late son’s bedroom. They’d intended it to be for only a week or so at the beginning of the summer; they would stay long enough to see Daniel buried, his funeral having been delayed on account of the run on war dead.

  Then Byard and MaLou had surprised everybody, coming home one night with narrow bands of gold on their ring fingers. Martha and Rafe, even Arlene in her grief, were happy for them: it was obvious they’d fallen head over heels. Byard took on work at Gil Miller’s tree-trimming business, just temporarily and for cash under the table, his legal status being precarious. The week after Daniel’s funeral, MaLou picked up some freelancing at the Picayune. It was even her suggestion they stick around a while to help Arlene get back on her feet.

  But lately MaLou has not taken time off from being pissed at him for one thing and another, most of it traceable to any time he spent with his brother Levon, or really, with any of his family. It has been a while since MaLou threw her arms around him the way she did at the beginning of this strange summer, when the two of them would be so drawn to each other’s heat he feared he would break her ribs, he held her so tight. Even now there are times she forgets being mad and
looks at him with a love he finds bewildering, and she says things like, “I want to know everything about you.”

  No, you don’t, Byard thinks, staring at the psychedelic poster taped to the ceiling over Donnie Ray’s bed. Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore, the wavy type says. Donnie must have mailed off for it, because as far as Byard knows, nobody from Cementville ever made it as far as San Francisco. Other than Byard himself. He wonders if the day will ever come when he can tell MaLou the things he has done, the other reason he left, what really drove him to Canada. What would he say?

  Byard had overheard Raedine Miller trying to talk sense into Gil a few days ago when she brought lunch out to where they were clearing trees for the new power line. Gil needed to open up, she was telling him, maybe go talk to Father Oliver. Gilbert Miller, who had not cried a drop since their son Brandon’s funeral, was nearly bent over with the grief. He walked around at work like a five-hundred-pound chain was clasped around his neck. “Mourning is natural, honey,” Raedine had pleaded softly with him. “It’s not something weak that you have to hide. Remember what your mother always said: You’re as sick as your secrets.”

  If there’s any truth to that, Byard thinks now, he is terminally ill. He closes his eyes, wanting to believe that if he pretends at rest long enough, sleep will come find him, even here in Donald Ray Goins’s boyhood bed.

  His insomniac mind twists and spins until his eyelids flutter open to find the dead soldier standing over him, fading in and out like a television ghost. Byard knows it isn’t real, but he whispers to the dark, “You want your old bed back, don’t you, Donnie?”

  Which bones in the bone closet have been rattling the loudest since he returned to Cementville? What secret, of all the secrets, should he tell his pretty young wife first? Can he tell her what he has done this night, before it becomes a secret too big to hold, another set of bones rattling louder than he can stand? Should he tell her about the stranger who had come to town, about the ignorant and gullible face of a veteran who was only guilty of the crime of looking for work and friendship?

  Or maybe he should start from the beginning? Byard turns away from MaLou, hugs a pillow to his gut to stop the shudders of awful silent laughing. Because it is laughable, the idea of ever finding a beginning.

  HE HAS TO THINK HARD to remember how old he was when it happened. Had he already turned eighteen? When he and Levon tripped up the flimsy step into their mother’s trailer that night all those years ago, they stumbled into a familiar sight. The man was coming at her again. Byard and his brother banged open the trailer’s flimsy door in time to see Dwayne Hodgister knock their mother to the floor. The man Arlene Ferguson referred to as their daddy stood over her, drunk and murderous. Byard and Levon didn’t even have to glance at each other. Like two bodies with a shared brain, the brothers knew that if they let Hodgister get at her again there was a better than even chance he would kill her.

  To this day, Byard cannot be certain whether it was him or Levon who pulled the trigger on the Baby Browning Levon had taken to toting with him everywhere, bragging how he bought it off a ruined preacher run on a rail out of Tennessee. Levon had been firing the damn thing behind Pekkar’s Alley only an hour before, until Byard wrestled it from him and Calvin Pekkar told them both to shove off. And now Byard couldn’t remember whose pocket the gun was in, or whose hand was holding it, when a bullet left its snubbed nose and lodged itself into the skull of their erstwhile father.

  Hodgister fell on top of Arlene. Blood shot out his neck and across their mother’s face. She stirred and moaned and that was how they knew she was still alive. Byard pulled the dead man off Arlene and helped her to the back room and put her under the covers. She was beat up and shivering even though it was late summer and you could cut the thick air with your arm. With a wet rag Byard wiped the blood off her as best he could. Blood of this man, one of however many who had put their seed in her over and over again till Arlene’s body was worn out from babies.

  Dwayne Hodgister had been making the rounds for as long as Byard could remember, showing up randomly two or three times a year in his piece-of-shit station wagon piled with cheap-ass kitchen appliances no self-respecting homemaker ever bought, and a backseat full of even more cheap-ass presents for Arlene Ferguson’s growing progeny. Byard remembered those visits, Dwayne hanging around their mother’s house trailer for a week or two at a time, eating up their food and drinking Arlene’s beer. No matter where in the valley she moved her brood, Dwayne Hodgister always seemed to find her. A parasite returning to its host. Byard remembered how, when they were little, his big brother ran out to meet Hodgister’s car, how Hodgister pulled the scrawny Levon onto his lap and let him drive. The man would hand out ten-cent presents like a bogus Santa Claus, then he would hustle their mother into the back of the trailer while Levon and Byard and Daniel sat in the front room playing with their shitty flower pinwheels and Chinese finger puzzles and noisemakers that never made enough noise to drown out the grunting animal sounds coming from behind their mother’s bedroom curtain. The next day, Byard and Daniel would watch their traitorous big brother go off with the man by himself, Dwayne’s arm draped across Levon’s shoulder, his obvious favorite. Levon would come back with new shoes, or a stringer of perch, or a straw hat from Fountain Ferry, the big amusement park in Louisville.

  In Arlene’s trailer on that killing night, Byard sat there with his mother until he could time her even breaths. When he came out of the bedroom, Levon was going through the dead man’s pockets and coming up empty-handed, and Byard saw it for the first time: Levon was the spitting image of Dwayne Hodgister.

  “Don’t know what I was thinking, bum like him having anything,” Levon said.

  They became aware at the same time of their little sister, five years old, sitting up in the middle of the couch where she’d been sleeping.

  “Blood,” Augrey said, pointing.

  Baby Tony woke too and started to bawl. Byard patted the baby’s belly, those big eyes staring up at him, the tiny white face glowing from the moon shining through the window. Byard picked up the baby and took Augrey in his other arm and carried them both in to where Arlene slept. He opened the top of her dress to let the baby get at her milk. Augrey curled into her mother’s other side and drifted off to sleep. Byard sat a while longer, trying to picture how this all must have looked to the little ones, him and Levon scrabbling in. The blast. The blood.

  At eighteen, he did not consider himself a man of faith, but he did pray that night. Byard prayed that the little ones were not yet possessed of mind enough for creating memories. Their mother made soft noises, kind of a whimper, like a baby herself. Mother and babies blended into each other there in the bed, all one flesh. Byard was glad for them, even as he was envious of that temporary comfort, that pulsing warmth and sustenance, and he stood over them a while, watching.

  He went out of the room, pulling closed the curtain that stood in for a door.

  Levon was trying to drag the heavy body. Dwayne Hodgister was a large man, almost too thick to fit through the narrow trailer door.

  “Give me a hand here,” Levon said.

  Byard picked up the dead man’s feet and the two of them managed to pitch him into the mud below. The bare bulb of a floodlight atop a tall pole threw a buzzing halo of yellow onto the dirt yard. From the trailer stoop it was not far to the dilapidated shed where Levon kept his hounds penned up. The brothers panted with the effort of their burden. Their hands glinted in the moonlight, shiny with blood.

  Byard prayed silently for the second time: God help me. But not: God forgive me. He wasn’t going to ask that.

  In the shed, Levon’s hounds became excited and commenced with their awful baying, the sound Byard thought held all animal mourning condensed into a single note. His brother always locked them up and starved them four or five days before he aimed to hunt so that the poor bastards would be rearing to go. Levon silenced the dogs with one sharp command, then took the hatchet from the wall.

>   Byard closed his eyes as the extraordinary quiet of the shed was sliced by the sound of a juicy thud. Levon worked methodically. The hounds lay in a mute row against the shed wall. Then, at Levon’s signal, Georgie Boy, the granddaddy hound, walked over with his head low and licked one of the feet. He checked again with Levon, a questioning look—Was it all right?—before he carried the foot off to a corner.

  Each dog after that came over and selected a piece. They lay together in a contented circle, chewing. Byard stood still in the dark shed as if cast in a salt pillar by a pitiless god.

  “Unless you plan on sleeping in there, you best come on out,” Levon said, and Byard realized his brother was getting ready to lock up. He joined Levon under the circle of light outside. Levon locked the shed door. He hung the key on a nail at the corner of the building.

  “There’s something rewarding about taking care of a problem once and for all, isn’t there, little brother?” he said, and there was a chilling softness in his voice, a sincerity, as if he were giving to Byard a teaching, sharing a profound knowledge of something that had been long and arduous in the learning.

  Byard tried to stand up straight but he was shaking hard and he braced himself against the wall of the shed. He bent over and retched into the crabgrass that fanned out from the base of the building. Levon patted Byard’s back. Byard threw his brother’s hand off. When he was finally able to stand on his own, Levon laughed in his face.

  “Don’t tell me you’re actually shedding tears over that motherfucker.”

  “We should have called the police,” Byard said. “They might’ve hauled us in for questioning, but he was ready to kill Mama. Nobody would have blamed us shooting him.”

  “Us? You pulled that trigger, little brother. It was you.”