“Why?” Raleigh’s glasses flashed right back at hers. “Ha ha.”
She nodded. “All right.…Now, maybe he picked these particular things out for a reason. But don’t count on it.” Taking the pencil from her hair and pulling a small spiral notebook, like the one Raleigh carried, from her pocket, she waved them at him. “If you’re going to do a thing, do it. Are you?”
“I can’t even stand to think about it.” Raleigh pushed up out of the rocker and hugged the nearest porch column. “Couldn’t we get the police looking for him, couldn’t they find him before he gets to New Orleans, and bring him on home?”
Miss Hayes began writing in the pad. “They might find him. I doubt it. But they can’t force him to come home. Now, he says he’ll come back to the hospital if you go get him. Plus, Raleigh.” She looked at him over her glasses. “He told me to say, if you do what he asked, he’s going to leave you a lot of money, and if you don’t, he’s going to cut you right out of his will. Of course, he laughed when he said it.”
“I don’t care about the stupid money.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Well, I’d like to know how that man keeps finding so much to laugh at, unless he’s unhinged. One thing that’s always burned me is how happy crazy people can be. Raleigh, stand still or sit down.”
“Hayeses laugh,” said Raleigh.
“It’s no credit to them. Right here in this house, joking and talking away their years of golden opportunity. Driving down to the beach, stopping for a treat every fifteen miles. And playing, they didn’t care what, cards, baseball, you name it.”
“Trumpets,” sighed Raleigh. “Daddy and Furbus and Hackney in that combo, remember? Why in the world did that man ever go into the ministry? Obviously it was not the right calling. By a long shot!”
Victoria tightened her mouth angrily. “The less said about that combo the better.”
“Whatever happened to it? I can’t really remember.…”
“Nothing.…” She pulled a Kleenex from her pocket and twisted her nose with it. “They never had the get up and go to do anything with it, except drive the neighbors off of their porches in the heat of July, they played so loud and late.”
Suddenly—in her frayed sweater and garden-soiled cotton print dress and wound gray curls—she turned into Raleigh’s grandmother Ada, who’d sighed over Hayeses all her life. Inside Raleigh, time spun around, and he saw the porch crowded with his relatives. Aunts and uncles and cousins were in the swings and rockers, they sprawled on the stoop and perched atop the wood rail, feet looped between the slats. Men in high belts and felt hats and bright ties; women in checked and dotted and flowered dresses, and their soft summer white polished shoes.
He could hear the baseball game on the radio, the piano playing “Heart and Soul,” and Hayeses talking, joking, playing. He was five years old, running back toward those safe sounds from the dusky wooded side yard, where, behind the high dahlias and hollyhocks, his older cousin Paschal, and Bobbie, the girl from next door, both with their underpants around their ankles, stood with their hands on their private parts. Shocked, Raleigh had run back to the porch swing, and his father had leaned down to him, bobbing hello with the glittering gold trumpet.
The past whirred off and Victoria Anna was saying, “Joked away a fortune in land before Papa’s time, then Papa sat down talking while PeeWee Jimson stole the meat store out from under his nose. Not that Papa had any business in the butcher business anyhow. One time he asked your daddy to hold a calf while he hit it with an axe, and your daddy pure and simple let the thing go. And it bolted down the street till I could catch it while Earley and Papa sat right out there on the back steps crying and laughing till tears raced down their faces. The only surprising thing is, it took PeeWee till Papa died to get control of the furniture store, too. No, the only one with any get up and go was me. I was the only one that got up and went, too.”
“You had natural push,” Raleigh agreed, as he always did. “God knows where you got it.”
Her mouth pulled stiff with pride. “Even if I was a girl, I wasn’t about to sit around Thermopylae and watch the gate rust off its hinges and fall into the road. All the rest of them built as close to Mama and Papa as anybody could without adding on to the roof. You could have swung a chicken and slapped them all in the face with it.”
Despite Victoria’s contempt for her family’s garrulousness, she had increasingly become, Raleigh noticed, quite a gabber herself, particularly on the subject of her own character. He interrupted. “Daddy left his suitcase on the bed to fool the nurse. I suppose I ought to go back to the hospital and see if I can’t find out who this girl he ran off with is.”
Victoria pushed up her frayed sweater sleeves. “A vagrant. I already found that much out. One of those poor, stunned creatures the police pick up loitering at the bus station without a cent to their names.” Raleigh’s aunt acknowledged his surprise with another vigorous shove at her sleeves. “They took her over to the hospital for some observation and Earley slapped a blond wig on her head that he stole out of Reba’s bathroom and waltzed off with her before they found out a thing.”
“That’s just great,” said Raleigh and rubbed his head along the square wood column he hugged for comfort.
“Raleigh, you want to know, you’ve got to ask. You want to do, you’ve got to do.”
“That’s true.”
“Of course it’s true. You don’t know how true it is unless you’ve had a donkey keel over and die out from under you in the jungles of Borneo.” As she talked, Victoria Anna kept writing in the spiral notepad, pressing so firmly that the paper curled. “No,” she concluded, with a tap of her pencil, “if there’s rhyme or reason to this so called by Aura ‘quest’ your daddy’s put you up to, it’s by me. You’re supposed to meet him in New Orleans on the thirty-first. This is the sixteenth.” She checked her newspaper for confirmation. “And bring, one…” She circled the “1” on her list. “…his trumpet. Where does Roxanne Digges live?”
“I haven’t the foggiest idea and could care less.”
“Two, PeeWee’s bust. Well, we know where that is. And, three, Gates.”
Raleigh pressed his head hard into the column. “I haven’t heard from Gates in five years.”
“I bet Lovie has. Four—pay attention, Raleigh—Tiny’s trunk. I already looked in the basement. It’s down there, rusted shut. And Lovie’s got the family Bible. She came over here a few years back and dug it out and took it with her to the hospital for luck.”
“Luck? Seems like she lost her breast that time.”
“That’s right.” The two realists nodded at one another over the inefficacy of talismans. “Now. You know who Goodrich Hale Hayes was?”
Raleigh shrugged. “Some old Hayes.”
“He had get up and go. I bet there’s where I got mine. He built a kind of hotel spa used to be out on Hillston Road near Knoll Pond. The Yankees burned it down. When I made my plans to join the Daughters of the Confederacy…”
“You?”
Victoria snorted. “You don’t have to believe the nonsense, but if you’re in sales, you have to join the clubs; you know that, Raleigh; I’ve taught you that. But naturally not a soul I asked could recollect who any of our ancestors were. ’Course, if Gates had just been born back then, I could have asked him to forge me up a family tree, but as it was I had to look things up for myself, and Goodrich Hayes was a major at Vicksburg and a colonel at Atlanta, and made it all the way back up here to North Carolina, and ended up getting shot the last week of the war. By then he was a general. I found this all out in the Daughters, and I’ll go over the papers for you this afternoon.”
“You still have them?” asked Raleigh. Aura couldn’t find her coffee cup if she put it down to answer the phone.
“Raleigh, I have got my entire life in three steamer trunks. I can put my hand on any item you could name in the dark.” She made a vigorous circle on her note paper. “Of course, there’s one thing that’s never going to hap
pen in this world, and that’s Pierce Jimson selling you that old cabin on Hillston Road, or any old anything, once he knows anybody named Hayes wants it.”
Raleigh could not resist his body’s urge to swing out by one arm around the porch column. “I bought it this morning,” he announced.
“You bought it?”
He could not resist a grin. “I bought it.”
“Knoll Pond?”
“From Pierce. For only twenty-five hundred dollars.” Raleigh changed arms and swung back the other way. “This morning.”
Aunt Victoria snapped open the silver watch chained to her dress belt. “It’s only seven-fifty.”
He kept grinning. “I guess you’re not the only one with a little get up and go.”
“Well, good for you, Raleigh.” She snapped her watch shut and spun it like a globe, nodding as if she were ticking off her travels as it turned. “Though I don’t know why you didn’t bother to say so right off.”
Raleigh’s elation slid away as he admitted, “Well, it just sort of happened when I happened to run into Pierce and…” As it was impossible to conceive, and so explain, why Jimson had agreed to sell the cabin, Raleigh ended his sentence by leaning over the porch to break irregular shoots off the top of the bordering hedge. “Anyhow, the whole thing’s entirely preposterous. Does Daddy honestly believe I intend to acquire a gun…” A chilly horror rushed over Hayes like ice water as he remembered, as he felt at this minute, Mingo’s pistol in his jacket pocket. He stuttered quickly on, “And steal public property from the public library, and even if I wanted to, you think nobody’s going to see me carting off a big plaster bust right past them? For Pete’s sake!”
With a decisive rock forward, Victoria propelled herself to her feet, and briskly pinched at her dress front. She said matter-of-factly, “PeeWee Jimson was a conniver, a thief, and a fat-faced false-hearted ugly-mouthed hog.”
“I didn’t really know him.”
“My papa was a fool,” she added as she jammed the notepad in her pocket. “You come back over here when you finish, and we’ll haul that little trunk out. This afternoon, we’ll drive to Cowstream and see Lovie. Maybe by then she can locate that Bible under those two or three months of unironed clothes piled on the couches with chicken bones and poker chips.”
“Finish?” Raleigh stared at her. “You mean, you think I should—”
Victoria jerked up her big watch again and opened it in her nephew’s face. “Library opens at nine thirty.” From the stoop she took a waiting pair of cotton gloves and long shears. Starting at the sidewalk corner, she whacked ruthlessly at her shrubs while she quizzed Raleigh. “What’s across the street from that library?”
“Elementary school.”
“Other side.”
“Grandpa’s old store.” He moved behind her along the hedge, dodging the bristly hedge-tops as they flew out of the shears. “Why?”
“You ever go down in the gully at the end of the parking lot, see where the old culvert used to come out? Old water pipes from way back?”
Raleigh shook his head.
“Big old round tunnel went under Garden Street. Earley and the rest used to play hideout in that tunnel. They didn’t want me, but I said I’d tell, so they had to let me along.”
Raleigh now recalled that he had run with Jimmy Clay and Mingo through this same abandoned water pipe once, that Mingo had collapsed in claustrophobic paralysis when Jimmy turned off his flashlight and began to howl, “GHOOOOOSTS!!! VAAAAMPIRES!!! BLOOOOOOOD!!!” He brushed a branch out of his hair and adjusted his glasses. “Aunt Victoria, what are you talking about?”
She kept clipping. “That tunnel branches. There’s a fork to your left, just inside, look up, you’ll see a lid cover.”
Had, in her old age, congenital insanity caught up even with her? Snap, went the shears. Greenery like epaulets gave her sweater a military look. “That cover opens up in the library basement. It’s got a throw rug over it. I’m on the book-binding committee, and I was asking just a while ago, when I was down pasting spines and I stubbed my toe on that lid, why nobody ever sealed it up. They used to say how folks hid slaves down there, but it wasn’t even built until 1910. I do know it was voted back in the fifties, when everybody got in such a snit about the Communists, to turn it into a fallout shelter, but nobody ever got around to it. Earley and the boys used to sneak through there at night into the library and moon over any book they could find with a naked woman in it.” She gave a last quick set of whacks to the hedge and shook out her shears. “They’d been with me in Fiji, they could have seen enough bosoms to last a lifetime.” Victoria crossed to the far side of the shrubs without a look at her nephew, who stared, large-mouthed, at her straight back, until her elbows again started their energetic scissoring. “Get going,” she told him. “Don’t dawdle.”
“Aunt Vicky, are you seriously suggesting that I crawl through an abandoned sewer, even supposing it’s not filled in, even supposing the cover’s not rusted shut—”
“It’s not.” The blades sparkled like scimitars in the green branches.
“And rob the library, of which you are a board member, and haul PeeWee’s bust all the way down to New Orleans? Are you, a religious woman like yourself, seriously intending to make that suggestion?”
Victoria pulled her glasses down on her sharp nose, exposing the undiminished blue ruthlessness of her eyes. “Raleigh, let me tell you something. I’m no more religious than you are. My family put me down for the religious one without bothering to ask, since they’d decided Big Em was a good homemaker and Lovie was a clown and Serene was sweet and Reba was pretty. That just left religion for me, is the way they figured it, I guess. Every last one of them is satisfied I signed up with the World Missions Company just the way you’d sign up for a nun in a convent.” She wrestled a twig stuck between her blades. “I wanted to get out of this town and I became a traveler. That’s the short and simple of it. Missionaries see a good part of the world. I saw it right behind them. I’ve got no use for Christianity. Love’s not enough and never was, and if any Hayes had ever looked up from a piano in Thermopylae, they’d know better than to think so. Now I believe your daddy truly is religious, and that ought to give you some notion of my views on that subject. So.” She snapped off a glove. “Do you want Earley—and don’t think he’s not crazy enough, because I’ve known him a lot longer than you have—to give your entire inheritance away to every poor begging mental patient he happens to meet on the road?”
Raleigh had to admit that he didn’t.
“Have you ever even been to New Orleans?”
Raleigh confessed that he hadn’t.
Victoria shook her glove in her heir’s face, as if she planned to challenge him to a duel, as in fact she did. “Well, Raleigh, then get up and go.”
Chapter 7
In Which the Hero Commits a Crime WITH AUNT VICTORIA’S OLD CHROME FLASHLIGHT and older huge canvas knapsack on the seat beside him, Raleigh Hayes drove in low gears down Main. He kept the slow pace of the child Raleigh, whom he could now see pulling hard at a wagon heaped with dozens upon dozens of empty Coca-Cola bottles; these he had once collected, to sell for two cents each, from the sugar-greedy Hayes house, where there was even a separate refrigerator on the back porch with nothing in it but soft drinks and beer, and maybe on the bottom shelf a few cantaloupes and half a watermelon. His aunts and uncles called all soft drinks that weren’t orange, “Cokes,” and they drank them straight out of the ice-frosted small green bottles. On a summer night, scrunched in a corner of the big porch, Raleigh would watch the dark liquid vanish in their great loud long-throated swallows. They drank them from morning till bedtime. Uncle Hackney, who liked to freeze his Cokes, so that he had to pound on the bottle with his fist to pop out the chunks of crystallized caramel, once drank eighteen in a single evening. As soon as he finished a bottle, he’d wave it in the air, and call, “Raleigh, two cents!” and laugh a long singing laugh, and pull a cigarette out from behind his ear, an
d pick back up his ukulele to strum “Love, oh love, oh careless love…”
Careless love, for certain. And careless life, and sooner or later (mostly sooner) careless death. Who but a careless lover like Hackney (three hundred pounds of potato salad, pork ribs, and lager ale; cigarettes wedged against his skull by his fat ears; one lung punctured by the fishing knife of a sore loser in a five-card-draw game at Wrightsville Beach; and a heart that had already warned him twice to quit it), who but a careless Hayes like Hackney would chase a fly ball on a Carolina July noon, with the sun as big and round and hot as he was, chasing after him? Careless, uninsured death.
What had been so funny about selling the empty bottles anyhow? Driving now, Raleigh could see himself pulling that wagon; he could hear the pant legs of his baggy, tight-belted corduroys brushing each other; he could feel the wind swooping into the short sleeves of the red plaid shirt that flapped against his thin chest and arms. An odd, hot, thick pity for that boy—frail, earnest, hurrying along the sidewalk—swelled in Raleigh’s throat. Why pity? Why not pride? Hadn’t he purchased his own bicycle (a black Raleigh bicycle, as if custom-made) with that bottle money? Hadn’t he kept that bicycle in such good repair he was able to sell it four years later for scarcely less than it had cost him? And the extravagant bicycle that his father, then living in adultery with Roxanne Digges, had brought on Christmas to the house where Raleigh lived alone with his mother, hadn’t he spurned it with a proud and righteous “No, thank you”? Why not pride?
The adult Hayes, thinking about the child, had already neared the intersection where the stern windows of Carnegie Library squinted across Main Street at the elementary-school playground, squinted in disdain at the ancient but freshly painted seesaws and swings as if outraged by the gaudy lures of her old rival for the hearts of the young. The library hardly bothered to look at all at Jimson Furniture Store to its right, despite the bold invitation painted in huge white letters along the brick side: STOP, SHOP, SAVE.
Handling Sin Page 10