Even Now

by Susan S. Kelly

  “No, ma’am,” Peter called uselessly as the parish house door slammed. “I’m following instructions. Daintry thinks my first job in a new parish is to charm the underpants off the OG.”

  “’OG’?”

  “Old Guard. Humor the natives.”

  Suddenly I knew Daintry had devised the cheat sheet Peter had referred to at Ceel’s party. I wondered what two-word description she’d used for me. Best friend? Old friend? “Daintry always was. . . instructional.”

  “Do it this way, Hannah. You turn a cartwheel like this. You’re not doing it right.”

  “Of course it hurts. It always hurts to change the part in your hair.”

  “You should eat more Jell-O. It makes your fingernails stronger.”

  “Maude doesn’t seem like much of an ally. Can’t a new rector hire whoever he wants?”

  “Interim rector, and I am hiring who I want—you.” Beyond the crumbling blacktop of the rear parking lot, the grounds sloped steeply downhill to a primitive split-rail fence separating church property from the Rural Ridge Cemetery. As if protective and proprietary, a thick hardwood forest spangled red and gold surrounded the graveyard. Gentle inclines and barely leveled terraces of the dilapidated graveyard proper fell away to a valley boundaried only by the notched and curving shoulders of the Blue Ridge. Square specks of barns and houses pegged corners of pastures and Christmas tree farms. An isolated pocket even for Rural Ridge, the cemetery had an ancient air, still and undisturbed. I leaned my elbows on the fence. “I had no idea this was back here. So peaceful.”

  A dry gust ripped leaves from the trees, and acorns rained down, rattling with percussive snaps on railings and headstones. The graveyard’s maintenance was minimal, only enough to check wilderness from reclaiming it. Leggy shrubs crowned hummocks and plumed jutting boulders; thick tufts of scraggly weeds and grasses overran burial plots, if they could even be termed such. For there seemed no formal delineation of plots, no planned design. An obelisk kept counterpointed company with a humble rounded headstone; listing, lichened monuments shouldered glossy modern markers. Rock outcroppings formed natural stopping places together with rough levels carved in earlier decades on the steep hillside to accommodate visitors. Above and beyond, the distant mountains floated powdery blue, merging with the sky.

  “I love cemeteries,” I said. “So tranquil and contented.”

  “Came here myself last week to write my sermon. What did you think of it?”

  “I. . . ”

  “Caught you again,” he said, and cleared his throat loudly. I remembered that from Ceel’s party, a throaty cough that said I know what you’re thinking and I’m right, admit it and We agree all at once. “Even without my X-ray glasses. Half the men are thinking about their golf game, afraid I’ll go over the eleven-minute limit.”

  The sleek tabby that had followed us arched sinuously against my bare leg, and I stepped away. “She came with the rectory,” Peter said. “A church cat instead of church mice.”

  “Where’s the rectory?”

  “Just a good pitch from the church.” He pointed up the hill to a white clapboard barely visible behind full-grown magnolias. I wondered if either of the two windows I glimpsed were Daintry’s. Daintry and Peter’s. I straightened, as though my father’s knuckles had prodded me in the spine. “Hold your shoulders up,” he’d say.

  Peter nudged the animal with his toe. “Scat, Cheshire. Can’t you tell when someone doesn’t like you?”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “Bird lover?”

  “Yes,” I said, thinking of the cardinals in my Durham smilax, the disintegrating feeder outside our kitchen window now. “But. . . ”

  “But what?”

  “There’s something sly about cats. They’re stealthy and secretive. They . . .” I tried, “Withhold things.” Peter laughed. “You know what I mean,” I insisted. “No matter their gender, cats seem female. Females. . . turn on each other. They’re predatory.”

  “I should probably have her neutered, but she doesn’t really seem mine.”

  “There you are, that’s another thing. No ownership. No loyalty. It’s like . . .” I gave up. “If you don’t know what I mean, I can’t explain it.” “If you don’t understand why Thursday’s the best day of the week, I can’t explain it,” she’d said in sixth grade. And later: “You can’t define ‘sexy.’ You know it when you see it.”

  “But I do understand,” he said. “The way they play with things, torture their victims for fun.”

  Years before he was to torture Ceel with more lasting effects, Geoff O’Connor had invented spit tortures. Occasionally he deigned to play Monster with us on summer evenings. Insane with suspense, Daintry and I invariably ventured from our hiding places and were trapped as easily as the wild mustangs in my Misty of Chincoteague books. A mute spectator, I watched Daintry pinned to the ground by her older brother, his head a foot above hers. He worked his lips to form a bubble of saliva. The bubble became a bead, and the bead grew into a dangling glutinous worm that Geoff sucked quickly back inside his mouth at the crisis moment when Daintry shrieked and writhed, and I was certain the glob would splat on her face. The spit torture became one in our repertoire of playful cruelties that escalated from roughhousing on the grass, immune to my mother’s warnings: “Don’t blame me if you get itchy!” But with its opposing elements of pleasure and fear, it wasn’t so different after all from Daintry’s appeal to me.

  A rumble and blossom of dust signaled a truck’s passage along the unpaved service road no wider than a cart path that wound through the graveyard. I squinted at a barely visible, curiously shaped statue and swung my legs over the fence. September sunshine was hot on my back as I made my way down the hill toward the headstone, Peter just behind me.

  Except that it wasn’t a headstone, but a concrete rocking horse no higher than my knees. Astride it sat an angel, a plump cherub whose stocky thighs were clamped round the pony’s girth. But the child’s moss-mottled fingers held no reins; they were forever clasped in prayer. Or entreaty.

  Nearly hidden by brambles, a porous stone was embedded in the earth just beneath the little statue. I lifted the thorny branches gingerly and read the plain and plaintive dates etched there. “Isobel. A little girl. Only seven. She’d be. . . eighty.” I blinked back sudden tears in my eyes. “Every now and then you’re reminded of how much you take your children for granted.” Stalling to collect myself, I touched the grainy chubby cheek of the angel child and stood.

  Peter, though, had seen. “Need my handkerchief?”

  A handkerchief. My father had always carried two items in his pocket, a Chap Stick and a handkerchief. Snot rag, Daintry had called it. Gross. I shook my head. “Little hay fever.”

  He held out the limp white flag. “Hannah—”

  “It’s okay, really. For a minute there my heart was puncturated.”

  “Translate?” he said, and I loved that single-word question, implying it was all he needed to say.

  “Once after soccer practice, Mark’s chest hurt from all the running and he told me his heart felt puncturated. He was about Isobel’s age.”

  Peter’s hand closed over my forearm. “Everyone does it. We’re all guilty.”

  “Does what? Of what?”

  “Taking people for granted, like you said.”

  So he’d listened, not turned away in embarrassment from my emotional moment. Of course he did, I told myself, he’s a minister.

  Now he tugged gently on my sleeve. “This way, in the woods.”

  Within the forest ten minutes later, Peter halted, pointed. A plot of ground barely fifteen feet in diameter was outlined with cinder blocks. Some persevering soul had planted fall pansies in the hollows of the rough bricks, and the purple-petaled faces bloomed valiantly.

  “This is the columbarium?”

  “So-called,” Peter said. “Not terribly hallowed, is it?” It wasn’t. It was perfectly square, perfectly plain, perfectly terrible. Invasive wild str
awberry vines competed with airier but no less determined honeysuckle tendrils for dominance of a tree stump in one quadrant. The spreading, palm-shaped leaves of violets matted and overlapped another corner, and above a thatch of grass gone wild, dandelions sprouted. Peter leaned to pick one of the tempting downy spheres.

  “Careful,” I said. “That’s poison ivy beside your foot.”

  He pointed to a two-foot-high tree. “At least there’s a magnolia.”

  “See how spindly the trunk is? Just a volunteer seedling. It’ll probably never bloom, and we don’t want a magnolia. It drops leaves, and the shade kills anything under it eventually. The three smaller trees are keepers, dogwoods.” I stepped within the enclosure and knelt to read the few markers. They, at least, were lovely: small, simple plaques of black marble inscribed with no more than dates and names. “Only four?”

  “Can you blame anyone? Ninety-nine percent of the world can’t bear the idea of cremation, and this place would hardly change anyone’s mind.”

  I brushed away nut hulls and stroked the marble’s cool surface, thinking of the mahogany box that had held Daddy’s studs and cuff links, now holding his ashes. It had rained for five full days before Mother and Ceel and I accompanied the minister to the Cullen cemetery for a private interment beneath still gloomy skies. Coffee-colored runoff had pooled in our footsteps on the marshy earth, and the hem of the rector’s vestment quickly grew sodden and discolored with wet. Through the fog of my grief I’d sadly marveled at how little of the red Carolina clay required unearthing to accommodate a container smaller than a shoebox.

  “Hannah?”

  I looked over my shoulder into his sun-speckled face. “My father was a one percent.”

  “Was he?” He squatted beside me. “Will you help me, then?”

  “You’re very persuasive.”

  “Persuasion was my best subject at seminary.” His eyes fixed on mine. “Shake their hand hard and look them in the eye,” I was constantly advised by my father. Common advice, yet I’ve found that truly looking someone in the eye—not briefly, fleetingly, but direct and unglazed—is one of the most difficult physical things for people to do. Did he learn that at seminary, too?

  I stood, moving away. “What was Daintry’s best subject?”

  He lifted his shoulders. “Daintry made straight As in everything.”

  Of course she did. “I’m gonna flunk our English test for sure,” she’d say as we waited for the school bus. “I didn’t study a bit.”

  “Me either,” I’d say, an immediate partner in disingenuousness. Because we both had studied and we both were lying.

  “Daintry gets a dollar for every A,” I’d report to Mother, hoping for equal treatment.

  “It’s poor practice to pay for grades,” she’d answer, unmoved.

  I roused myself from childhood’s far corners. “I ought to go,” I told Peter, and together we climbed the hill. Again he opened the car door for me.

  “What’s a fair wage for your services?”

  “I’m not a landscape designer. You can’t do that.” “Hannah,” he said with easy reproval as I ducked inside. “The choir’s paid.”

  Another surprise. “Are they?”

  “I wish I didn’t have to be the one to tell you that the church is as much about illusion as anything else.”

  I knew about illusion. Daintry had taught me that, too.

  We spent our summer afternoons at the town pool, the public swimming pool down the steep, rooty incline from the Kiwanis cabin. Playing Keep Away, Marco Polo, or Sharks and Minnows—the O’Connor version, with different, tougher rules. The pool lay behind a chain-link fence and beneath top-heavy pines that cast the deep end in chilly, shifting shadows. The painted-plaster, false-blue depths scared me, and I avoided them as instinctively as I avoided the dank basement bathroom of the cabin, where teenagers sought the airless gray isolation to grind against one another.

  “Go for it,” she’d prodded me. Something shiny and silvery and round—a button? a dropped locket? a quarter or half-dollar?—was lying on the bottom. “Go on.”

  “I can’t hold my breath that long.”

  “Yes, you can. Then we’ll be able to get a Coke and nabs.”

  I looked again. It had to be money: The circular shape never moved but wavered back and forth invitingly, shrinking and enlarging with the constant motion of the water.

  “You,” I said, and toed the wet concrete lip that read 12 FEET.

  “Don’t be a baby,” Daintry said. We were eleven. “Besides, I brought the money for a snack yesterday.”

  Frightened but commanded, I summoned courage, stamina, and the lungful of air needed for a plunge past thrashing bodies, past the lifeguard’s unalert eyes, to the overchlorinated, high-pitched pressure of the silent, sunless bottom.

  “Go on,” she said, and I dove, arrow straight, for the cold, ear-pounding deep.

  Kicking, blinking, I raked my hand over and over on the scratchy surface of the pool floor, groping at the spot where the treasure had to be. Had to be, I’d seen it, Daintry had seen it. But nothing was there. No medallion, no locket, no coin. Until, lungs and ears and eyes afire, I kicked frantically back to the surface toward the slimy runoff gutter littered with pine needles and paper scraps. “Daintry,” I gasped, prepared for commiseration.

  For we’d been tricked, fooled by nothing more than the peeling blue paint of the swimming pool floor; deluded by a circular patch of ordinary gray concrete laid bare by negligent maintenance.

  Or only I’d been tricked. Because Daintry hadn’t waited to congratulate or commiserate, to pull me out or buy a treat or play a game. Far up the hill I saw the flag of the towel around her waist disappear into the squalid wet-walled cave of the changing rooms. She’d sent me down deep and left me.

  Peter Whicker’s arms stretched on either side of the car door as if safely enclosing me within the opening. Outlined by the sun, his silhouette was like that of Sunday’s Eucharist, when I’d glimpsed that brief bodily shudder. I remembered something I’d meant to tell him, to test him, to see his response. “ ’To make favorably inclined,‘” I quoted from the heavy Webster’s Hal and I used to arbitrate our casual challenge of definitions. Routinely stumped by the words in my husband’s unparagraphed, undialogued tomes of history and philosophy, I never guessed correctly. “ ’To appease,‘” I went on, “ ’conciliate.‘”

  Peter looked at me a long moment, amusement and admiration playing across his features. “Say it,” he said. “Say you will.”

  “All right, I will. I’ll do it.”

  He smiled broadly, knocked on the windshield, and began walking toward the parish hall. I watched his dark figure—trousers and shirt and head—in the rearview mirror. Suddenly he whipped round, never breaking his stride in a backward walk. “Propitiation!” he called, laughing.

  Peter Whicker had remembered something from the party, too.

  “ ’Solipsism,‘” Hal said from behind the newspaper.

  “A figure of speech? Sounds like ‘soliloquy,‘” I guessed. “Maybe something related to a Freudian slip?”

  “Impossible—doesn’t fit in this sentence.” He riffled through the dictionary and read aloud. “ ’The theory that only the self exists.‘”

  “Foiled again,” I said, looking over the school list of teacher workdays and holidays that had come home in Ellen’s bookbag. I opened my calendar and began marking the dates. “Easter’s early this year, mid-March.”

  Hal turned on a floor lamp. “And six months away. I can’t believe you’re entering those dates already. Is there a single spontaneous bone in your body?”

  I thought of the magazine quizzes—Teen, Young Miss, Seventeen—Daintry and I had taken, reading aloud the coy questions and advice. Keep him guessing! Mysteriousness is interesting! Don’t be predictable! I spontaneously took a job today, I could have said. I curled my hair forward over my forehead, creating a ragged fringe. “Maybe I’ll cut bangs. How’s that for spontaneous?”r />
  “Unh-hunh. You self-destruct every time you go into a beauty parlor.”

  I flicked a finger against the newsprint hiding his face. “How was the mad mommy?”

  “Placated.”

  “Is that it? No tantrums, no threats to withdraw her child, no bargains for behavior?”

  Hal was silent. Finally from behind the paper he said, “I can’t discuss it with you. It’s confidential.”

  “What?” The answer was stunning. “Confidential to me? Your wife?”

  Wordlessly he folded the section, rose, and stretched. “So how was your day? What did you do?”

  I thought of my day, the church and the columbarium. Of Peter with his handkerchief and tennis shoes and mean mother manners. The way he’d looked at me, listened to me, surprised me. “I didn’t do anything today,” I said to Hal, and slit open the electric bill. “Nothing at all.”

  From Hannah’s quote book:

  It’s a shock . . . growing old—suddenly finding yourself on unremembered corners surrounded by a flood of forgotten association.

  —Zelda Fitzgerald

  Chapter 6

  The flat-roofed roadside emporium looked afloat on a bubbling orange sea, the parking lot teeming with pumpkins. In a gaudy Halloween hallucination, late afternoon sun glinted off the slick rinds.

  Searching for the big, bigger, biggest, Ellen scrambled nimbly among the pumpkins. But I headed to the rear in search of a different kind of treasure and discovered it behind decorative tepees of dried cornstalks: a jumble of potted plants left to their own survival on brick-and-board shelves. The plastic pots were crowded one against the other, the soil within them crumbly, the perennials uprooted from some backyard garden grown leggy and brown edged. I touched a black-eyed Susan bloom dried crisp as paper.

  Yet everything I wanted was here in the unsold, unseasonal inventory priced for quick riddance. Lacking that early, enticing florist-perfect glory, the drooping, stalky, bloomless flowers were forgotten, abandoned. I saw their invisible promise, though, knew that with pruning and a winter’s dormancy the faded specimens of coreopsis, echinacea, and platycodon would be hardier, tougher, come spring rains and summer sun. The promise of the future is the only reason to garden.