by Lisa Alther
“Maybe that’s where your mother is,” said Molly. “Behind the sky.”
“Is that really true?” Jude asked. “Or did you make it up?”
“I can’t remember.”
At the first hint of dove gray in the eastern sky, as a pale silver sliver of crescent moon arced above the headstones in the cemetery on the hilltop, they turned off the faucet and dragged the hose into Sandy’s parents’ toolshed.
“VERY FUNNY,” SAID ACE as the two girls pedaled past the abandoned construction site the next morning, purple circles under their eyes like bruises.
“What?” asked Molly.
“That.” Ace pointed to the sea of orange mud where the Commie Killer headquarters had been.
“What happened?” asked Molly, blinking her baby blue eyes.
Jude chewed the inside of her lower lip to keep from grinning.
“You tell me, pukeface.”
“Did it rain again last night?” asked Jude.
“Tell your parents to start saving for your funerals,” said Ace, gazing at them through his opaque black eyes like Sergeant Friday on “Dragnet.”
JUDE PEDALED LIGHTNING TO HER grandmother’s large white brick house on the next block to welcome her home from her trip to Savannah for a Daughters of the Confederacy convention. “I told your granddaddy,” she once explained to Jude, “if he expected me to leave behind my beautiful colonial Virginia, he’d have to build me a new dwelling place. I wasn’t gonna live out my life in his hillbilly shack.” After constructing his bride’s neo-Georgian mansion and leasing the farmland in the valley to Mr. Starnes, Jude’s grandfather sold off the rest of his family farm for house lots and a golf course. Her grandmother named the resulting development Tidewater Estates. Jude and her father now lived in the “hillbilly shack,” a rambling house of chinked logs built by Jude’s great-grandfather, a half-Cherokee herb doctor.
Jude remembered removing the knitted mitt from her grandfather’s three wood so that he could tee up in his backyard and drive his golf ball across the river to the first green of the golf course, whose fairways scaled the foothills like a grassy roller-coaster track. Then he descended the cliff to the river’s edge, put his golf bag in a boat, and rowed across the water to continue his game. Having been a left-handed bush league baseball pitcher before his conversion to medicine, he had a golf swing that was the envy of the county.
Following her husband’s death the previous year, Jude’s grandmother circled the globe twice on the Queen Elizabeth, sending Jude postcards and dolls from each country. Jude steamed the stamps off the cards and saved them in an album. And she removed the elaborate national costumes from the dolls to amputate limbs and extract organs. Then she stitched the incisions with needles Clementine threaded for her, as she had watched her father do when she went with him on house calls to hill farms.
Jude mounted the brick steps, white columns on either hand. Standing on tiptoe, she lifted the knocker hanging from the teeth of a huge golden lion head. A row of shiny cars waited by the curb, so her grandmother was probably having a club meeting. She went to one almost every day she was off the high seas—bridge club, garden club, Junior League, Bible study group, DAR. What Jude liked best about her grandmother was how glad she always seemed to see Jude. If you interrupted most adults when they were with other adults, they looked at you as though you were a skunk wandering in from the woods.
An unfamiliar young woman in a starched white uniform and ruffled black apron answered the door. “I reckon you be Miss Judith?” Her front teeth were gapped like a derelict picket fence.
Jude nodded. Her grandmother always hired farm girls from the part of Virginia where she herself had grown up. Her father had been chief of staff at the Confederate Veterans’ Home on the outskirts of Richmond. They had lived on her mother’s family farm on the Rappahannock River near Fredericksburg, which had supposedly been a land grant to her forebears from King James I for their agreeing to leave England. Jude’s grandfather, descending like the Troll King from the misty mountains to the west, had done his residency at the Veterans’ Home, wooing and winning the boss’s daughter in the process.
“Your grandmaw, she’s having her a Virginia Club meeting this morning,” the girl said. Accustomed to chopping tobacco and herding cows on hillside pastures, the maids usually found Jude’s grandmother’s recipe for gracious living as incomprehensible as Jude did. They rarely lasted longer than a few months.
Through the hall archway, Jude could see women in pastel summer suits and flowered hats seated around card tables covered with embroidered linen cloths, eating chicken à la king from flaky pastry shells with her grandmother’s Francis I forks, which had silver fruit all over the handles. Her grandmother always insisted this silverware would be Jude’s when she died, but Jude didn’t even know how to cook. When she grew up, she planned to go for dinner every night to the Wiggly Piglet Barbecue Pit on the Knoxville Highway, where waitresses in short shorts, cowboy boots and hats, and lariat-string ties took your order at your car window.
Sandy Andrews’s mother was saying, “But you know, I think I like Tennessee almost as much as I do Virginia.”
Jude’s grandmother answered, “Yes, but I believe you get a better class of people in Virginia, don’t you, Mavis?”
Fortunately, Jude’s grandmother had insisted that Jude’s father drive her mother across the state line to a Virginia hospital when she went into labor with Jude—so Jude would be able to attend these meetings when she grew up.
Her grandmother spotted Jude in the doorway. “Why, hey there, darling!” She stood up and strode over on spike heels so high that she looked like a toe dancer. Her silk suit was the color of a robin’s egg, and the skirt just barely covered her kneecaps. Her hair was also blue, and at her throat was the pearl necklace she wanted Jude to have when she died. In the center were big creamy-pink pearls separated by tiny knots, and the pearls got smaller and smaller toward the ends. The necklace was very pretty, but Jude wished her grandmother wouldn’t always talk about dying. When she bought a silver Cadillac in the spring, she’d said to Jude, “This will be the last car I’ll ever buy on God’s green earth.” (Apparently, she thought she might buy another in heaven.) And each time Jude saw her now, she said, “Honey, this may be the last time you ever see me alive, so take a good long look.”
“Evelyn, go get my little Virginia granddaughter a Popsicle,” said her grandmother. As Evelyn headed toward the kitchen, she whispered, “Honey, where’s your shirt at today? Virginia girls always wear shirts.”
Evelyn returned, thrusting a cardboard box of Popsicles at Jude.
Her grandmother said, “Now, Evelyn, I’ve taught you better than that. Remember, you’re in high society now.”
Evelyn stomped back to the kitchen and returned with a monogrammed silver tray holding several Popsicles.
Jude took a cherry one, saying, “Thank you, ma‘am.”
Her grandmother murmured, “Darling, you don’t need to say ‘ma‘am’ to the servants.”
LICKING HER RED POPSICLE, Jude pedaled to the cemetery at the end of the block. She wished her grandmother would stay home more often. When she was gone, Jude tried to avoid going past her big, empty house because it made her feel sad and lonely. What if one day it really was the last time Jude saw her alive, as had already happened with her mother and her grandfather?
Walking across the field to the wrought-iron gate, Jude stooped to pick clover blossoms, until she had two bouquets. To one side were the graves of soldiers killed in the War Between the States and of pioneer mothers who had died having babies. Sometimes their babies were buried beside them with toy headstones. Some of the graves had sunk in the middle when the wooden coffins rotted, and several stones had broken off or fallen over.
Jude placed a bouquet by her grandfather’s headstone, a shiny, red granite obelisque that read: “A savior in life, with his Savior in death.” He had had kind hazel eyes behind thick lenses in wire-frame glasses that perched l
ike a giant insect on his aquiline nose, funny earlobes that hung down like a bloodhound’s jowls, and a cute little double chin that puffed out like a bullfrog’s throat when he laughed. Her grandmother said he had spent hours holding Jude over his head playing Flying Baby while Jude’s father operated on soldiers in the belly of a troop ship in the mid-Atlantic, with torpedos plowing past and alarms screaming overhead.
Jude remembered sitting on his lap on his screened back porch, watching the Holston drift toward the Smokies. He told stories in his soft mountain drawl about cutting off men’s arms and legs in a big tent by a river in Belgium. About a pit like a buried silo, full of German prisoners. About climbing down into it on a ladder, with a big red cross on his chest so they wouldn’t hurt him. About a muddy field honeycombed with foxholes, where dead trees poked up like broken toothpicks. About tangles of rusted barbed wire that looked like a blackberry patch in the autumn. About men in metal helmets hanging from the wire, screaming while huge birds swooped down to tear at their wounds with sharp beaks and claws.
Jude’s grandmother had come out of the house to ask, “Charles, do you really think it’s a good idea to tell this child your horrible war stories?”
He looked up at her through his thick lenses. “She needs to know what she’s up against. I wish I had known. All the soldiers at your daddy’s hospital told me what an honor it had been to lose their limbs for the South. So I thought I was going to march in a uniform and be a hero.”
“Jude’s a girl, dear, not a boy.”
“She’s a human being. We’re all in this mess together. That’s the only thing that makes it bearable.”
For a moment, he looked as if he was going to cry. Jude’s grandmother reached for his hand, as small and supple as a woman’s, with which he had hurled an unhittable curveball, with which he could chip and putt like a professional golfer, with which he could operate by feel in otherwise-inaccessible sites. As she stroked and kissed it, he began to look less miserable. Then she returned to the kitchen to work on her file box of secret family recipes, which had gotten her elected president of the Virginia Club. She claimed the South Carolina Club had nothing to equal her Brunswick stew, which she’d adapted to modern times by replacing the squirrel meat with beef.
“Did you ever shoot people?” Jude asked her grandfather, standing up in his lap and patting his cheeks with both hands to cheer him up.
“No. My job was to patch up the ones who got shot, so they could go back to their trenches and kill some more Germans.”
“But why?” asked Jude. She studied one of his cheeks carefully. Tiny hairs were sticking out of it like dark blue splinters. She wondered if they hurt him.
Her grandfather shrugged. “Most people are scared as treed coons, and scared people turn nasty.”
“Scared of what?”
“Scared of living. Scared of loving. Scared of losing. Scared of dying. Scared.”
“Are you scared?”
“Sometimes.”
“Not me. I’ll never be scared,” said Jude, not yet having met Ace Kilgore.
“Not if I can help it, honey,” he murmured, kissing her frown lines.
SQUATTING BY HER MOTHER’S GRAVE, Jude placed the second bouquet on the edge of her stone, a simple rectangle of cream-colored marble with forked green veins that branched across it like lightning. Her inscription read: “At Rest at Last in the Arms of the Lord.” One day her mother was in the kitchen at home, baking butterscotch brownies and wearing a bulging apron covered with pink roses. The next day she was asleep in a white hospital bed and wouldn’t wake up, even when Jude sang “Rise, Shine, Give God His Glory” right in her ear. And the day after that, she was here in this mound, being kept warm by a blanket of beautiful white flowers that smelled like her favorite perfume. And Jude’s grandmother from New York City was weeping silently by the grave with a dead fox draped around her neck. It had tiny claws and glittery orange eyes. Her husband, Jude’s other grandfather, who wore a gangster hat low over his eyes, kept wiping the orange clay off his shiny black shoes with a white handkerchief.
In a low voice, Jude began to tell her mother about Ace and the cat. When she got to the cherry bomb, she heard rustling among the dried milkweeds left over from winter. Looking up, she saw the Commie Killers in army fatigues and face masks, crawling on knees and elbows like evil insects, rifles cradled in their arms.
Jumping up, she looked all around.
“So,” said Ace, leaping to his feet and aiming his rifle at her, “I guess we better show you what happens to little girls who talk too much.” His father’s colonel hat slipped down over his eyes.
Jude ran toward the sidewalk. Someone tackled her. They dragged her, kicking and biting, to a sunken grave. Pushing her into it, some held her down while others piled fallen tombstones across the mouth of the hole.
“A perfect fit!” announced Ace. “See you around, kid, as the line said to the circle.” And the Commie Killers vanished.
Jude could hear a lone cicada droning like a chain saw from a nearby walnut tree. Six weeks until the first frost, Mr. Starnes always said. She pushed at the stones above her head, but they wouldn’t budge. She tried to figure out how much clay lay between herself and the skeleton below. What if it reached up and dragged her down into the earth in its bony arms? Maybe if she stayed perfectly still, it wouldn’t realize she was there.
She was so scared that she could hardly breathe. What if the stones came crashing down and smashed her into a human pancake? She wished her grandfather would help her, as he had promised, but he was lying on the other side of the graveyard, probably just as scared as she was.
She paused in her panic to wonder if the tiny blue hairs on his cheeks would have kept growing so that he now had a long beard, and dagger fingernails like Dracula, and toenails that would one day sprout from his grave like blanched asparagus spears.
What if a nest of black widow spiders had been disturbed when the Commie Killers picked up the broken headstones? What if the black widows were crawling all over the stones just above her head? What if they didn’t realize that she wasn’t the one who had wrecked their home? She sank as far down in the grave as she could. But then she remembered the skeleton below and tried to twist sideways out of its grasp.
She lay there in the dark, eyes closed, breathing as little as possible. At Sunday school, the preacher was always talking about how great nature was because it displayed God’s handiwork. But what about black widow spiders? What about copperheads? What about leeches and mosquitoes and bats and ticks and wasps? What about Ace Kilgore?
Gradually, her body relaxed into the contours of the sunken grave. Ace was right: She fit like Cinderella’s foot in the glass slipper. This was what it was like to be dead, and it wasn’t so bad. If she stayed like this long enough, she would be dead and she could join her mother in heaven and never have to see Ace Kilgore again.
Billowy white clouds were drifting like spinnakered sailing ships across an indigo sea of summer sky. Beautiful smiling women in white bathrobes were reclining on them, waving as they passed. One woman with curly black hair and full red lips looked exactly like Jude’s mother.
“Wait!” called Jude. “Take me with you!”
But they seemed not to hear.
A dog began snuffling and yelping up above. Jude kept her eyes tightly shut, struggling to return to her mother.
“Jude, are you okay?” called Molly through an opening between the broken headstones. Sidney was beside her, whimpering and flailing frantically at the stones with his paws.
“I guess so.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll get you out,” said Sandy, freckled face looming in the window of light. “It’s just a question of leverage.”
THEY SAT IN SANDY’S tree house drinking grape soda through straws that bent like gooseneck lamps. The Commie Killers, shirtless in the hot afternoon sun, were redigging trenches across the street beneath a Confederate battle flag that hung limply from a pole stuck in the mud. The
phone rang.
Answering it, Sandy said, “Oh, hi, Nicolai.” He reached for a notebook. “Let’s see, what do I have for you today? Oh, yes, queen to king’s bishop four. Okay. Talk to you soon.”
“Moscow,” he explained, running his hand over his cowlick in a futile attempt to smooth it down. “Right, so first of all, Jude, don’t ever play alone again. If Molly hadn’t seen your tricycle, you’d still be in that grave. I can’t spend all day at my telescope watching out for you two. I’m in the middle of some very important chess matches. Why don’t you play with Noreen next door?”
“She’s a girl,” said Molly.
“We’re not really girls,” said Jude. “We just look like it.”
NOREEN AGREED TO LET Jude and Molly be her sons if Sandy would be her husband.
“Okay,” said Sandy, standing outside the shed attached to Noreen’s parents’ garage, “but I’m the kind of father who spends all day at the office. And my office is my tree house. And only my sons are allowed to visit.”
“But pioneer fathers don’t go to the office,” said Noreen from the doorway. Her dark naturally curly hair was parted on one side, and a red plastic barrette shaped like a bow held it back from her face on the other side. The frames of her glasses matched her barrette.
“They go hunting, don’t they?” asked Sandy, walking toward his yard. “Pretend I’ve been eaten by bears. Pretend you’re a widow.”
“You’re no fun,” said Noreen.
“Sorry about that.”
“Well, all right, come in, Jude and Molly.” Noreen stepped aside. “Sit down. We’re having supper.” Supper consisted of dried clay patties served on wild grape leaves atop an orange crate.
Noreen’s “daughters” were a puling bunch in flared shorts with matching halter tops. Red plastic barrettes shaped their hair into bizarre lumps and mounds, as though their skulls were deformed. Most dandled dolls, nursing and burping them as they ate, and discussing their infant antics in wearying detail.