The Reservoir

by John Milliken Thompson

  Willie laughed. “I know you. You’re Fannie Lillian, and almost grown up since last summer.”

  “Lillian.”

  “What?”

  “It’s not Fannie Lillian anymore, it’s just Lillian. Or Lillie.” She sniffed out, as though challenging him.

  Tommie remembered his cousin now—really his mother’s brother’s granddaughter, which made her and her many brothers and sisters his first cousins once removed. Except slightly more removed, his mother had said, because the brother was a half-brother. She said it in a kind of disparaging way, as though this branch of the family was not one she was proud of.

  “Well then, Lillian,” Willie said, “What have you got to say for yourself?”

  “Nothing to you.” She had run off while he was telling her how sassy she was, but not before taking a closer look at Tommie, who said nothing at all. There was a mischievous smile about her lips as she turned and wisped up over the lawn like a spirit. Then he and Willie went and sat at the edge of the hayfield and he told Willie he wished he were not going off to Aberdeen. Willie said not to be stupid—he, Tommie, was the smart one, the one who needed an education. “All I want is right here,” Willie said. “And someday my own buggy, and a horse to go with it. Maybe even a wife.”

  “I want to go places,” Tommie said. “See the Taj Mahal and elephants and New York and Paris.”

  “The burlesque shows?”

  “Maybe,” Tommie said, blushing.

  “You can see an elephant up in Richmond. John Griswold saw one at a circus there.” Tommie said it would be nice just to see Richmond.

  Before school started, his father took him up to Richmond for a day. Aunt Jane wanted to treat them to dinner at a hotel restaurant, but, not wishing to hurt her brother-in-law’s pride, she ended up just giving Tommie a little spending money and packing him a lunch in a paper sack.

  Two years later Lillian came to live with them after some unspecified trouble in her home. She had been at Cedar Lane more than a month when Tommie returned home from Aberdeen for the summer. She and Willie had started out shy with each other but had become friends, and sometimes even fought like brother and sister. Now Tommie found himself the interloper in his own home. His young cousin seemed to enjoy tormenting him, mocking him whenever he tried to discuss Plato or Shakespeare at the dinner table. “I guess there’s no point in trying to be civilized around here,” he said, glaring at her.

  She smiled sweetly. “You could learn to be civilized if you tried,” she said. “You could say please pass the butter, instead of reaching across the table like a baboon.”

  Stunned into silence, he wanted to slap her pert little face. Aunt Jane scolded them both; Willie just sat there enjoying the show. After supper Tommie watched through the summer kitchen window as his brother and Lillie went out to grain the horses. He clomped up to his room and tried to read, but found himself staring out the window at the barn.

  Later in the summer he saw the two of them walking hand in hand coming up from the back hayfield. He was on the porch rocker and pretended not to have noticed anything. But they didn’t leave off holding hands even in the yard, and he realized it was for his own benefit that he was pretending. Willie stopped at the well to fill a bucket, and Lillie dashed on up the stairs, stopping just long enough to say, in mock seriousness, “Hello, old Mr. Tommie.” She laughed and disappeared inside. He slammed his book shut and got up to help his brother.

  One afternoon when he was walking home from the river, she was lying in wait behind the cedars lining the drive. Instead of springing out at him, she waited until he had passed, then quietly slipped just behind him so that when he realized someone was there he lurched around with a frightened “Whaaa!” He turned back around, trying to ignore her. She asked him where he’d been, and he said, “The river.”

  “What for?”

  “To look at the side-wheelers. Who wants to know?”

  “Not even to fish?”

  “No.”

  “You’re so different from your brother.” She mouthed something, but made no sound.

  He kept walking, head down, hands in pockets, not caring if she imitated him. The way to deal with her, he’d decided, was just to let her have her fun, and then she’d grow bored and run off. But this time she seemed to want to talk with him. She asked him what it was like at Aberdeen. She was going off to Bruington Academy at the end of the summer; it too was a half-day upcounty. “Not bad once you get used to it,” he told her.

  “But don’t you miss being at home?”

  “Sometimes. But they keep you pretty busy.”

  “I don’t miss my home in Manquin, but I think I might miss it here.”

  “Why don’t you miss your home?”

  She thought about this for a minute. “Can you keep a secret?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re mean to me.”

  “Who?”

  “Ma and Papa. Not so much my brothers, and my little sisters hardly ever. But Papa won’t let me write or get letters from boys. He tore the lock off my trunk and burned all my letters, from girlfriends too. I said he was the very devil, and he whipped me so hard I couldn’t sit down good for a week.”

  Tommie did not know whether to believe this tale.

  “I have a little blister right here,” she touched herself above her left breast. “I was sick when I was little and they didn’t have enough money for a doctor. That’s what Aunt Jane said. She said the girls at school won’t take any notice of it. Did you get whipped a lot?”

  “No, hardly ever.” Tommie thought about his father, too heartbroken to ever raise a hand to him after the death of his little brother. And his mother, kind and gentle, especially so in the evenings after her medicinal doses. He had resented them for letting themselves go to where they’d had to send him and his brother to Aunt Jane’s. Of course, they’d said that he and Willie would have better opportunities with Jane than they could provide, and it did not take long for them both to see that this was so. “They whipped Willie some, when he was little. He got in trouble more.”

  “I expect he did,” she said. Again, her lips moved soundlessly.

  “Why do you do that?” he said.

  “Do what?”

  “You say back the words to yourself after you just said them.”

  She looked at him hard, then blushing, said, “I don’t do it as much as I used to. My little sister crosses her fingers whenever she sees a black cat, and my brother spits instead of saying a cuss word.”

  Tommie looked into her eyes, wondering about a girl who would want to check her words after they’d been said. They were almost at the house now and she slowed down. “I got in trouble too, somehow. I don’t know why.” She seemed on the point of saying something else, then she saw Willie around the side of the house and hurried over to him.

  By the end of the summer, she and Tommie had become, if not friends, then at least tolerant of each other. And he began noticing her more, the way a lock of hair curled down her forehead, or how she would absently scratch an ankle while reading, and the color that would suddenly come to her cheeks when she was excited or embarrassed. At times she was downright plain-looking, but when she was animated she was almost beautiful. He found himself seeking her out to give her advice about boarding school. During the day when he was out in the fields working with Willie, the new muscles straining in his shirt, he missed the sound of her voice, her trickling laughter. He would listen to her talk about a sick calf a friend had written of, or about some needlework, just to hear her speak.

  And then it was time to say good-bye, her school starting before Tommie’s. She hugged them all, lingering longest with Willie. Then when Willie went to help her into the cart, Tommie stepped forward too, as though she needed two people, and her hem caught under his foot. She laughed as it pulled loose, and he stood there feeling foolish and awkward and waving to her.

  Later that day Aunt Jane told him in private that she thought Bruington would be good for
Lillie. “And it won’t hurt for her and Willie to be apart for a while. Not that I don’t trust them. But between you and me I trust him more.”

  Word gets around that the girl found at the reservoir may not have killed herself. In fact, a coroner’s jury is looking into the possibility that she was murdered. When Mr. Lucas asks Mr. Meade what he thinks about it and Mr. Meade says he thought all along she was murdered, Mr. Lucas is skeptical. But mainly he is worried. In his shirt is a potential piece of evidence. He goes back to his work. At times he takes out the key and examines it. He likes the heart shape at the top and the weight of it in his hand. He has begun to feel it was Effie’s gift to him. That’s what he calls the dead girl. He has concocted fantasies involving Effie and himself. In his favorite, he comes back to the reservoir at night just before she jumps in. He sees her huddled in the cold by herself, crying softly, and he asks if he can be of service. “Not much good with problems of the heart,” he says, “but if it’s a leaky pipe that needs fixing, I’m your man.” She smiles at his awkward attempt to comfort her, and lets him put an arm around her shoulders. He tells her that something made him want to come up one last time and check on the reservoir grounds—he’s not sure what, but now he’s glad he came. She has nowhere to go, so she spends the night with him. She ends up staying on, cooking his meals for him, and having the baby in his house. At first he’s like a father to her, but eventually—he’s not sure how—she comes to love him as a man.

  The idea that there was a man with her that night suggests a different story. Now Mr. Lucas arrives during the middle of a struggle. He takes a blow to the head, but Effie is spared and the man runs off and is never heard of again. The rest of the story is more or less the same, except that occasionally Effie will cry for no apparent reason. Yet Mr. Lucas knows that in her heart Effie understands how cruel her young lover was. He takes the watch key out of his shirt and looks at the little heart shape. What he feels now is anger. How could someone do this to such a poor, sweet little girl?

  What would his mother want him to do with the key? More important, what would Effie want? He knows, he knows. Yet what could he say to Mr. Meade now? He would have to wait until tomorrow, and then say, “Well, Mr. Meade, I was going my rounds this morning and I came across a curiosity.” It would be a lie, but it would be the right thing to do, much better than saying he’d discovered it Sunday.

  He finds himself out walking in a drizzling rain, and without his realizing it he is headed up to the almshouse where the body of the drowned woman is being displayed for identification. Just to refresh his memory, he tells himself, in case he gets called up for a witness.

  Inside, he takes his derby off and gets into the line of people. The girl is laid out in a dank stone-floored chapel, watery gray light filtering through the arched windows. It isn’t right to have her displayed like a sideshow curiosity, Lucas thinks. There is a rumor out that her name is Fannie something. He takes a look, but doesn’t recognize her as the same girl he pulled out of the water. She seems smaller and deader, and she has been cleaned up. The bruises around her eye and mouth are more noticeable, or, he wonders, does he just think that because the paper mentioned them? He’s disappointed she no longer looks like Effie, just a girl named Fannie. On the one hand he is relieved—he was half afraid he’d want to touch her or kiss her—but on the other hand he wants more than ever now to keep her watch key. He doesn’t know why. It just feels like it’s his now, something she gave him. Leaving the chapel, he touches his hand to his chest—it’s his.

  On Monday evening Tommie is up in Tappahannock, where he spent the whole day with Brown Evans working on an estate settlement. There’s a will to probate, entailments to decipher, piles of papers to dig through, documents to copy, three contending branches of the family to satisfy, each with legitimate claims on a property going back to the 1700s—in short, it’s the kind of work Colonel Evans has taught Tommie to seek out and love. “We could be up to our elbows in this for weeks,” he says with satisfaction, lighting up a cigar at the inn where they are spending the night. “Not that I want a Jarndyce v. Jarndyce.” As a friend of the family, he took Tommie on after law school, and Tommie has not disappointed him. The only thing that worried him a bit was that Tommie seemed reluctant for a while to cross the river. Tommie had his own reasons for not wanting to go over into King William, and it had nothing to do with being lazy.

  “It’s a damn shame they can’t get a newspaper out here any quicker,” Tommie says, holding a copy of Saturday’s paper. Sunday’s might have something important.

  “What were you looking for?”

  “Oh, just wanted to see the news. It’s not every day you have a Democrat as President.”

  Evans smiles. He massages his fringe of graying hair with his thumb and middle finger. Evans has a rotund face that goes naturally into a smile and reminds Tommie of a carnival barker in an orange-checkered suit he once saw in Richmond—though Evans wears dark, restrained clothes, Tommie can’t help picturing him sometimes as a pitchman. A case of Bell’s palsy half shuts his right eye, except when he’s excited about something, and then it becomes apparent that both eyes are equally alert. “Tommie, you never fail to impress me. Politics might be just the thing for you someday. You have a gift for persuasion. Your courtroom locution is coming right along. You’re clever too. You know when to be the educated gentleman and when to play the humble country boy.”

  Tommie adds a polite word about the case at hand, then goes back to his paper. Evans wants to talk. “You know, someday you won’t have to wait a day for a newspaper. I’m sure of it. Do you know they’re planning on stringing electric lights all over Richmond? Right through a wire, and pop! Light on every street corner. And telephones too. They’re opening up a telephone office down in South Point next year. The modern world is coming, Tommie, and you’ll be a part of it. But the thing I like best is the cigarette. You ever try one? Of course you did.” He laughs as Tommie agrees. “Richmond Gems. Wish I had one on me now. I have another cigar, though.” He offers one, but Tommie declines. “And the negro, Tommie. The negro is, per my prediction, proving as educable, in many cases, as the poor white. You mark my words. The black race is very clever. Putting them in office just to make us squirm was hypocritical foolishness, but they’ll be back. Mark my words, Tommie. Nothing stays the same. If I’ve learned anything in my life, it’s that. And if you can’t go along with it, you might as well give up and die. And who wants to do that? A new world is opening up to you, Tommie.”

  Evans sniffs the air. “Mmm that smells good. I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.”

  At the same hour in Richmond, Justice Richardson is paying a visit to Cary Madison. The carriagemaker and his wife are distressed to learn that the reservoir girl has been identified as his cousin. He agrees to go over to the almshouse tomorrow; his wife invites Richardson to come sit in their cramped little parlor and have a cup of tea. From Cary, Richardson learns that Lillian (the name she went by) was teaching in Millboro’ Springs, Bath County. “She’d just gone up there in the fall, round about October, and hadn’t moved anywhere else that I knew. I heard from them—when? I reckon a few weeks ago.”

  “Who was it you heard from?”

  “Her folks, down in Manquin.”

  Cary Madison strikes Richardson as a modestly educated, hardworking, reasonably honest young man. He works with his hands and has several days’ stubble on his face. “Do you know of any particular gentleman she kept company with?” Richardson asks.

  Madison thinks a minute, shifting his gaze to the faded hooked rug. “There was a well-driller name of Jenkins she took to for a while. Her daddy sued out a peace warrant to make him behave hisself, and he went away. Last I knew she’d taken up with her cousin, Willie Cluverius from down in King and Queen, but I don’t know if that’s true. Fact is, she corresponded with lots of young men.”

  “Oh?”

  Madison glances at his wife, then down again. “I might as well tell you, we correspon
ded for a time, her and me. She was keen on me, but there wasn’t much to it. She told people we were engaged, but we never exchanged rings or nothing. I think there were lots of young men like that.”

  “Were you intimate with her?”

  He looks at Richardson. “Naw, not like that. We kissed once, in a friendly way.”

  “So she had several young men friends in addition to this Willie Cluverius?”

  “I believe so, but you better ask her papa.”

  Richardson thanks him and hurries back to his office to wire the telegraph offices in Millboro’ and Manquin.

  • CHAPTER FIVE •

  THE WEEK BEFORE he went off to school, Tommie found himself looking for Lillian out on the porch, or in the kitchen, and had to remind himself that she was gone. The wildflowers she put in vases around the house wilted and were thrown out. The last of her jam tarts was eaten. And then he was off in school and busy again with his books and new roommates. But sometimes at night after he said his prayers, he would invent heroic dramas for himself. Her school was less than five miles away, and he would imagine her venturing out into the night to use the necessary and, frightened by a snake or a robber, she would cry out; like Heathcliff he would somehow hear her and come to her rescue.

  She wrote him once at school. He wrote back, wondering if her father would disapprove. They were friendly, cousinly letters. She told him her news and of her dreams of teaching or nursing in an orphanage in Richmond someday. Her teacher had been a nurse in a private Richmond hospital during the war, and it sounded like such a brave, romantic thing to do. She also told him that “Nola Bray has spread false rumors about me.”

  He sat down to write a response, but the letter came out sounding too stilted and sententious, full of precepts borrowed from the Bible and his pocket Shakespeare quotations. He crumpled the page and threw it away. He took out another piece of paper and wrote, “Dear Lillie, How I long to see you, just to stare into your brown eyes. At night I imagine coming to your rescue and holding you and kissing your sweet lips. I would press my throbbing chest against yours. Would you let me kiss your soft neck, and stroke your hair? If you said yes, I would die happy. Nola is a prig and I don’t care for her.” Tommie looked over his shoulder, then wrote, “If I could have one wish before I die it would be to lie with you naked.”