The Reservoir

by John Milliken Thompson

  “No,” Tommie said, “of course not.” He kissed her and instead of sliding his hand into her blouse, this time he tucked it under the waist of her skirt. She reached down and put the hand back on her breast, then fondled him until he moaned and spent himself. He had been wrong then about her virtue all along, or else there were things that he simply did not understand about her, or possibly about all girls.

  One time he got up at night, again with bowel trouble, and on his return considered going into her room, across the hall—so great was his need to be with her—but he didn’t want to compromise her any more than he already had. In the morning George asked if he didn’t get up at night, and Tommie told him he had. George said he thought so but he was such a sound sleeper, he wondered if he’d dreamed it.

  Finally there came a time in late spring when she demanded to know if he was going to ask for her hand in marriage. “I need to know,” Lillie said. They were out in Willie’s buggy, which Tommie was thinking of buying if he could scrape the money together. Thrushes were fluting off in the woods, and Lillie’s importunate tone gave Tommie some alarm. He asked her what the hurry was. “Nola wrote me that you were still good friends,” she said, “and might become reengaged.”

  “I love and respect Nola, but only as a dear friend,” Tommie assured her. “Compared with you she’s a teacup.”

  “So this isn’t just a dalliance for you?”

  Tommie held her and told her that he would go on holding her forever like that if he could. “I mean it. I wish I could put you in my pocket and carry you with me all the time.”

  “Have you told Willie about us yet?”

  “No,” he said, “I don’t see any need to.”

  “Don’t you want to tell somebody? I want to tell somebody, but I haven’t anybody to tell. I go on long walks sometimes with Uncle George and we won’t say anything for five miles, and then he’ll tell me he likes my dress. He’s the sweetest man, and sometimes I get so lonely I tell him all kinds of things—what I want to do when I move to Richmond, the kind of house I want to live in, how many children I want to have and what I want to name them. But I don’t have any friends around. There’s a girl named Mary Ellen Neale I met at a basket picnic. She goes to an expensive school in Fauquier and shops with her mother at a new store in Richmond called Miller and Rhoads, where you can buy clothes ready-made. She said she would invite me to a holiday party but she never did. Oh, Tommie, I miss you when you don’t come for weeks at a time.”

  “I’ll come again soon,” he told her.

  “Tommie, you come here when you feel like it, you make love to me, and then you just go away. I write to you and you don’t write back. Look at you, sitting there in your fancy suit.” She laughed, trying to take the sting out of her words. The buggy wheels grinding over the sandy clay were the seconds when his life could have changed. He was on the point of asking her to marry him. “Let me out,” she said. “Just stop and let me out, I’ll walk back, I don’t want to sit with you another minute.”

  She grabbed the reins and tugged, pulling the horse up short. Tommie told her to stop, but he couldn’t get the reins away from her. She hopped down. The road was too narrow to turn around where they were, so he got out and caught up with her. “Lillian, stop,” he said. “Stop this minute and look at me.”

  She turned and looked up at him, her face bunched with anger. “I hate you, Tommie,” she said. “If you were the last person on earth I would sooner kill myself than have to say two words to you.”

  He had never seen her this emotional before, and he was shocked that he could have such an effect on any woman. He wondered if it was her monthly, or if perhaps he had not been attentive enough to her moods in the past. “You don’t hate me,” he said, grabbing her wrist. She jerked away and kept walking. He had to go back and get the buggy. Lillie meanwhile was cutting across a newly plowed field in her nice shoes, the air fresh with the smell of loam. He called once more, then sat helplessly watching her pick her way among clods of earth, her hems lifted at first, then dragging in the dirt.

  He came again the next month on court Friday and spent Saturday as well, to help George put up a new fence. Lillie had cooked a roast on Friday and baked jam tarts, and she was wearing a new dress she had made of light blue jaconet. After supper he went out to the kitchen. This time she came to him, her hands wet and soapy. She wrapped herself around him and kissed him full on the mouth, prying his mouth open with her tongue and tasting him as though she were famished. “I don’t care how long you’re gone anymore, Tommie, as long as you keep coming back to me. You hear?” He nodded, his chin resting on her shoulder, his hands tucked beneath her bottom so that he was nearly lifting her up.

  “I brought you a present,” he said. He handed her an issue of Ogelvie’s Popular Readings. “Read the one I circled,” he told her. It was “A Gilded Sin,” the story of Sir Jasper Brandon, “courtly, passionate and silent,” whose daughter is the offspring of a secret affair; she nobly keeps her father’s secret, even though it may cost her a chance for true love and happiness. “That’s just for fun,” he said. Then he pulled a gold watch key from his pocket and placed it on the table.

  She picked it up and admired the little heart-shaped crown and the filigree around the middle. “I bought it at the shop in Centreville from a funny little foreign man. He doesn’t seem to like me much, because I was impatient about getting my watch fixed one time.”

  “I’ll wear it around my neck,” she said.

  “Or you could just keep it in your pocket,” he suggested. She tilted her head down and nodded. He could see she was disappointed it hadn’t been a ring. He had not yet made up his mind whether to ask her to marry him, because the truth was he still had fond feelings for Nola. He thought perhaps she would be the better wife for him and thus he a better husband for her than for Lillie. But he said, “It’s the key to my heart. As well as my watch.” She smiled a little.

  Then she threw her arms around his neck. “You’re a romantic, Tommie, and a gentleman. And you’re my knight, and I love you.” She pulled back. “But we will be engaged then?”

  “As soon as I’m in a better financial position,” he told her.

  That night he had to go outside, and when he looked up at her window he thought he saw her white nightgown against the glass and her pale face, like a ghost moon. He wondered if he was not losing his mind over her. It felt as though she had some spell over him, and yet was it not he who was doing the corrupting? “God,” he whispered, “help me do the right thing.” She was a good, kind, loving person; everyone knew that. But when it came to sex she was weak—though no weaker than he was.

  He spent a long hot day helping George with the fence posts, and then it was night again and he was not sure when he would be coming back. He went down to the kitchen to help Lillie, coming in so suddenly and urgently that she dropped a plate and it shattered on the brick floor. They bent down together to pick up the pieces, his hand closing over hers as she clutched a long jagged shard. He brought it to his throat. “Have you lost your mind?” she said.

  “I think I have,” he said. “I want you now.” Her eyes grew large, like a frightened animal. “I won’t hurt you.”

  “My monthly—”

  “I don’t care about that—it won’t hurt, will it?”

  “No, it’s just—the blood.”

  “I don’t care.” He kissed her forehead, eyelids, nose, and cheeks. “Meet me down at the meadow when you’re finished. I’m going up to the house for a minute.” He went striding up, singing “My Grandfather’s Clock,” lustily so that nothing would seem amiss. George was on the front porch trimming his father’s hair and beard. Uncle John sat in a chair, a white cloth tied at his neck, munching an apple. “He won’t sit still,” George said. “I told him Lillian can do a better job, but he’s used to me.”

  “I could use a shave myself,” Tommie said, rubbing his chin. “Lillian needed some more kerosene for that lantern and I forgot where—oh, I reme
mber, it’s back in the shed under the saw-horse, isn’t it?”

  “Yep, and that minds me that I need to fix that lantern. ’Tisn’t lighting a-right.”

  “Seemed to be working fine now,” Tommie said. “Just needs kerosene.” He went back through the house, singing, pausing at the linen chest to pull out their blanket, then quickening his step out the back door and down to the high grass beyond the yard. The moon was just coming up, its yellow light trickling through the woods. A barred owl hooted a hip-hurroo, the echo giving way to the stillness of dusk and the trilling of frogs.

  He couldn’t see her at first. “Lillie,” he called softly. “Are you there?” He waded through the hip-high grass, and listened. Lightning bugs winked secret messages across the darkening meadow. He moved toward her voice, and when he found her enfolded her in his arms. He spread the blanket and pulled her up onto his lap. She was as small and light as a child, and he felt as if he were cradling her, protecting her. He moved his hand into her blouse, she unbuttoning to help. When he tugged at her skirt, she lifted it and her petticoat and quietly undid the buttons and drawstring of her underpants. She gave herself to him as the moonlight engulfed their little nest in a pool of limpid silver. Feeling watched and cold, he held her tighter, until he quivered in relief, a timpani rumbling in his ears like distant thunder. She clung to him, her breath coming quick and shallow, and he could feel her heart thumping his chest. He kissed her, and was amazed that she tasted saltier; the evening air seemed filled with the pungent smell of her blood. The moon was in eclipse, and while they lay there it turned an angry, dark copper as though it had been swallowed by some unseen object. They both watched amazed and stricken as the shadow of the earth, stealthy and silent and unknowable, smothered the bright pale splendor of the moon. And it came out the other side and disappeared into the void and the moon shone as before.

  They cleaned themselves with the blanket. Then Tommie went and got the shovel and buried the blanket out in the woods.

  • CHAPTER THIRTEEN •

  TOMMIE IS EATING breakfast in his cell when Mr. Evans comes to tell him about the new piece of evidence. “They’ve found a gold watch key,” he says, “and they’re right proud of it.” He sits on the edge of the cot that Tommie carefully made only a few minutes earlier. “Apparently one of the reservoir workers found it the day after the girl was found, but he’s only just now turned it over. Why he waited a week, I don’t know.”

  Tommie is wearing a brown suit and bow tie. He takes a bite of toast and nods. “Could it have been planted?” he asks.

  “Of course that’s what we’re going to say. It’s mighty suspicious.”

  “What do they plan to do with it?”

  “Richardson wants to know if it’s yours. He’s going to ask around.”

  “He’s welcome to,” Tommie says. “It’s not mine. I have a fancy watch key, gold as a matter of fact. But it’s at home. I’ll get my brother to bring it up directly.”

  Mr. Evans tells him that would be a good idea. “In the meantime, I’ve brought a little work you can do for me—keep your mind off your troubles.” He pulls a sheaf of papers from his briefcase and sets them on the little table beside the wash basin.

  Willie arrives later the same day, bringing books as well as letters from well-wishers back home. Tommie tells him the news right off. “The one with the amethyst in the crown,” Tommie says, “you remember Aunt Jane gave it to me? Along with my watch? It’s in my room, in a little tin, with some letters.”

  “What about this other one?” Willie says. “What does it look like?”

  Tommie glances down, then at his brother. Willie has grown a beard and he is scratching it, deep in thought like his father on the point of some momentous pronouncement. “I don’t know what it looks like, because I’ve never seen it.” He opens his mouth to say more, then stops. “But, Willie, it could be one I gave to Lillie.” Willie’s eyes grow large and serious. “Listen, I don’t know that it is, but she was out there and they found it out there. Mr. Evans said it had a heart at the top. I’m sure a lot of keys look like that, but it could be hers and she dropped it somehow. I bought it at Bland’s and gave it to her, just a gift for one of the times I was visiting.”

  “When was that, exactly?”

  “It was last spring, around April I think, or early May.”

  “I see,” Willie says, now studying the concrete floor instead of his brother’s face. “So you were still sweet on her then?”

  “Yes, Willie, I was sweet on her, but—” He gets up and goes to the gate to peer down the hall. Two officers are talking out in the office. He lowers his voice. “But I had nothing to do with this. I swear to you I didn’t.”

  “I didn’t say you did.” Willie stands and leans beside some Bible verses that Tommie has copied on paper and pasted to the wall. He pulls at his beard. “I’m sorry, Tommie, I didn’t mean to sound angry. Since you weren’t out there, they can’t prove you were. That’s what makes me mad—is that you’re here at all.”

  Tommie sighs. “Willie, I don’t think it’d look good if they knew I gave her that key. There’s a record of the sale in Mr. Bland’s account book.”

  Willie takes the first train home in the morning and immediately goes out to the little village of Centreville, hauling a load of good wood in various lengths. He stops at Bland and Brothers’ shop. The itinerant jeweler is not in that day, which Willie takes as a good sign. He asks the elder Bland if he could possibly check something in Mr. Joel’s ledger book—he thinks he might be behind in a payment. Bland says it is an awfully bad business with his brother. He returns with the ledger book and leaves Willie at the counter while he goes out back to unload a shipment of cloth. “Help yourself to some wood out there,” Willie tells him. Willie finds the page he’s looking for, neatly tears it out, and folds it into his pocket. He closes the book and goes out to help Mr. Bland unload the best pieces.

  Tommie’s life is no longer his own. A doctor examines the scratches on his hand and makes notes. His lawyers come and go. Better meals are provided from Aunt Jane’s funds, but he eats them in the solitude of his cell. On Monday he is moved from the station house to the city jail, where he takes up the routine of all the other inmates. He is housed on the lower tier of the north side, with the other white prisoners. He breakfasts at eight, takes dinner at four, then is locked into his cell at six. There are long hours when he has nothing to do except read and write—activities he has always loved, except now they are practically forced upon him. He dives into his case with all his youthful energy, his lawyers bringing casebooks and documents and newspapers. The latter he devours, looking for every scrap he can find about his case, and every day there is a front page story: “Mystery of the Morgue!” “Who Killed Her?” “The Cluverius Case Continues.” He learns details he never knew about Lillie—how she had a close friend in Bath and how she supposedly told this friend she had a premonition something bad would happen to her. He finds himself fascinated and repelled by his notoriety, and cannot help reading and rereading the stories, sometimes laughing outright at how wrong they are. One claims she was his first cousin, another says he parts his hair in the middle. He wonders why it is that the papers have taken such a morbid interest in his case; he imagines that it comforts people to know they themselves are not in such a fix.

  For the first week he mostly keeps to himself and stays indoors. But as the days wear on he ventures out more and becomes accustomed to the crude language and rough manners of the other prisoners. There is a Greek bricklayer who in a drunken rage pushed his wife down the back steps of their tenement house. She broke her neck and died, but the baby she was carrying lived and is now being raised by her sister. He has no other children. He’s the most pathetic soul Tommie has ever encountered. He can spend an entire hour in the exercise yard weeping in a corner, or hanging on to the gate and staring dully out at the tenements across the alley.

  Tommie is something of a celebrity among the prisoners. He has refined
manners, and he can speak the language of the lawyers. Malachi Folger, an Irishman in for five months for disorderly conduct, says one day with a wink, “You know how I can tell you’re innocent? You never ask what I think about your case.”

  In the meantime the coroner’s jury continues its inquest. After three days they deliver their opinion: Fannie Lillian Madison came to her death on the night of March 13 in the old reservoir. Thomas Judson Cluverius was directly or indirectly the cause.

  The next day, Tommie receives a visit from Aunt Jane. His conduct having always proven courteous and cooperative, he is allowed to meet with her privately in the dispensary. “I brought your Bible,” she tells him. She places it and some other books and a sack of oranges and a pound cake on the examining table. “Are you getting your meals all right?”

  “A boy brings them from a colored cookshop around the block,” he tells her.

  “I hate thinking of you here all by yourself on Palm Sunday.”

  “I expect I’ll be here well beyond Easter, Aunt Jane. There’s still no grand jury indictment.” He puts his hand on hers, but withdraws it when she starts to sob. “It’s not so bad here,” he says. “They treat me nicely. If I was ever down on my luck, the first thing I’d do would be to get myself thrown in jail. It’s very quiet, and I can do all the reading I want.”

  She smiles at this, and even laughs a little. “Just tell me one thing,” she says. “Were you and Lillian ever in love with each other atall? No, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.”

  He smiles and suddenly wishes she had not come. “I’ll tell you this,” he says. “I’ve always been very fond of her as a friend and cousin. But you know that.” She nods, taking the words in as though they were filled with reassuring significance.

  Mr. Evans visits almost daily, except when business or family matters pull him back home. Tommie’s case has become his main focus, and he has taken up temporary lodgings with a Richmond relative. Tommie draws comfort from Evans’s quietly methodical manner, shambling in like a friendly bear, his right eye half closed as though winking. Crump is a decade older, yet he moves like a much younger man, his gesticulations precise, his whole body jerking when he makes a good joke; he’s plump and jovial, yet shrewd, not a man to be fooled with. Crump seems to want to penetrate the inner secrets of Tommie’s mind; Evans simply wants to work with the available facts, and, for now, Tommie trusts him more. Yet in the courtroom Tommie is certain that Crump will be the better advocate, that his big-talking style will appeal to the jury’s emotions.