The Book of CarolSue

by Lynne Hugo

  I can stifle tears. Gus, maybe two hundred sixty pounds of him, labored out of his patrol car. Sheriff was emblazoned along the side of the car in black and gold on a white panel, and I couldn’t help but notice how it contained the word riff. Shorthand for “reduction in force,” the Elmont Herald explained, as half the county was laid off or let go in the past couple of years. Why couldn’t Gus have been? Yes, I blame his interference for driving Harold to kill himself. But maybe it was my fault.

  “Morning, Gus. Thought I heard a car out here.” I threw my voice in his direction from the porch as I cleared up my eyes and arranged my mouth into a welcome.

  “How’re you doin’, Miss Louisa? You’re lookin’ fine!”

  Miss Louisa. That’s rich. “I am fine, Gus. How ’bout yourself?”

  “Can’t complain.” All the while Gus kept coming, right on up my worn porch steps.

  “What brings you, Gus? Something wrong?”

  “Just comin’ by t’see how you’re doing is all. Know it’s comin’ up on the anniversary.”

  Puffing fat men don’t pull off casual all that well. He was wearing his glasses today, and they looked tight on his face. I remember when Gus was almost too skinny and not bad-looking even if he did have some acne. Oh, didn’t we all. Even the boys in Vietnam then, like my Harold.

  “Well, that’s nice of you, Gus, but I’m okay. Of course it’s hard. I miss Harold and Cody like both my legs have been cut off, but what can you expect when you lose your husband and grandson within six months? I’m doing all right.”

  Gus didn’t say a word about how Gary had called him and sent him out here to confirm I belonged in a lunatic asylum. Probably told him that his poor mother was clearly losing her marbles, triggered by the anniversary of her husband’s suicide. Out here the sheriff is the law and the social service system. We don’t have a great tax base in this rural township. What Gus said was, “Mind if I come in and visit a minute?”

  I made a point of staring at his waist. “Not comfortable with that gun coming into my house, Gus. Perhaps you can understand since I’ve lost both Cody and Harold.” Now, no gun was involved in either Cody’s or Harold’s death, but I doubted Gus would think that fast. I truly think Gus showers with that gun on. But Gary probably told him he needed to see for himself that the house was filled with guns, chickens, and wanton disrespect for Holy Glitter. I was starting right out by throwing him a curveball about the guns.

  Oh, how the struggle wrote itself across his face. It was just like teaching my fifth grade again when one of the boys was looking for a loophole to wriggle through. “Well, now, Louisa, you know it’s my job to be armed. I can assure you I won’t touch . . .”

  “Then we can just visit out here, Gus. Nothing nicer than a porch on a spring day.” I felt the seat of the painted rocking chairs, then turned to the door. “No worry, chairs are nice and dry. I’ll bring us some coffee. Be right back,” I trilled over my shoulder.

  “I think it’s kind of chilly for you out here. How about I just put the gun out in the car while I come in. I’ll be on my own time without it, of course,” he said. The agony of defeat.

  “Oh my! Bless your heart, I thought you already were. Anyway, I appreciate that.”

  I waited while he lumbered back to his car and watched him put the gun in the trunk. When he returned, I opened the door and let him follow me inside. I couldn’t wait to see his face.

  “How about that coffee?” I said. I was going to let him have a good look at the house and try to figure out where I had stashed the ungodly menagerie. “Come on into the kitchen and I’ll put on a fresh pot. It’ll only take a minute.”

  “I’d love a cup. That’s a glorious picture. Is it new? Don’t remember seeing it when I was here for Harold. You an Elvis fan? I always thought he had black hair. . . .”

  His mentioning Harold, meaning how he kept coming here to arrest him—not that there was ever one indictment, not in this county—set my teeth on edge. “Oh yes, it’s a beauty,” I said. “Bless your heart. Gary painted that for me after Harold died. That sweet boy, bless his heart, too, hung it in the bedroom for me, but I’m just not in there all that much, and I decided to put it out here in the living room where I’d see it all day.” Marvelle twitched her tail in amusement from her throne on the back of Harold’s recliner. She and I share a sense of humor, something my son sorely lacks. Sometimes it makes me doubt everything I learned about genetics in biology class.

  Gus followed me too slowly to the kitchen. He must have been scouring the place with his X-ray vision while I started coffee in the four-cup electric pot Gary got me for Christmas. Gus got to the kitchen table and sat down. He thought I didn’t see him inch my calendar closer to himself and pretend he wasn’t looking at it. The FBI missed a brilliant operative. I don’t understand how he was able to thwart Harold’s schemes to get revenge on the man who’d killed our grandson, but he did. Or what made him so determined. Did he have to prove that he was a big man because he didn’t go to Vietnam and Harold did? What would Glitter Jesus have to say about that?

  “You sure look pretty. Haven’t changed in forty years. You been keeping busy?” Gus said.

  This was just too easy. “Oh my, bless your heart. Well, I have my girlfriends and activities. Actually, I’ve been thinking about doing some volunteer tutoring back at the school. Those farm boys still need to learn to read.” I put on my ultra-sincere face, and brushed the hair CarolSue had taught me to leave loose on my forehead to the side as I pretended to worry what to say. “I didn’t work over Christmas at the Toys! Store. Too hard to go back there after, you know, getting the call about Cody. Hard on the legs, too, all that standing, too far to drive to Elmont. Not that my friends don’t keep me running. But I need a solid focus.”

  “Seems like a fine idea.”

  “So, how have you been? What’s been going on? I know you’ve got a big job on your hands. Practically a one-man force. I haven’t really seen you since . . .” Believe me, I didn’t care how he was. This was to divert him into talking about himself so he’d think he’d learned all about me. And if the slant reference to Harold’s funeral made him uncomfortable, so much the better.

  “Oh now, I do have a deputy, and some part-time help. But you know, we have more DUIs than we used to, and you’d be surprised, I don’t know what we’ll do exactly to manage, more drugs coming in. People don’t realize. Even our own, you know, couple smart alecks growing . . . Hey, you don’t want to hear this stuff. Would you mind if I use your bathroom?”

  “Not at all. Down the hall, first door on the right.” So he felt he needed to check the rest of the house to see if I was keeping the zoo—or maybe growing pot—back there. I know I can’t grow pot, though. Not without buying grow lights first. I wonder if they’re difficult to install?

  After a ridiculous amount of time, the toilet flushed and the bathroom door opened with unnecessary loudness. I wondered for just a few seconds if Gus had really peed, and if his was like my Harold’s had been, damn prostate pee, he called it. I used to lie in bed and listen: a tiny stream, then silence, then a little more. Fits and stops. Sometimes I’d fall back to sleep before Harold even made it back to bed. If I was awake, he’d take my hand and apologize. He didn’t need to. After that bad fall he took in the dark making his way to the bathroom, I’d made him start to put on his glasses and turn on the bedside light when he had to get up in the night.

  Gus’s coffee was cooling on the kitchen table.

  “See everything you wanted?” I said as he re-entered the kitchen, my tone innocent.

  “Oh sure. Nice bathroom. Real nice.” Blocks of sunlight rested on the table then as the earth turned toward noon. That morning they looked almost solid, like something I could use to smash him, this man who’d come to spy on me, doing my son’s bidding. But it had been our Cody and my Harold who were smashed. Wishful thinking didn’t do a thing to Gus.

  “Miss Louisa, perhaps you would go to dinner with me sometime at the
Lodge? The hunting club has a dinner, you know, the second Friday of the month, and we bring the ladies to that.” Luckily for me, I don’t have a partial plate like Harold did, because I’d surely have swallowed it when Gus invited me out in the middle of my murderous thoughts. Some men have an astounding inability to read women, don’t they? Thank goodness.

  “That’s a . . . lovely, Gus. That you bring the ladies, I mean . . . I’m sure they are very . . . honored.”

  “For sure. They love it. So, what do you say?”

  “Thank you for asking me, but it just wouldn’t be right so soon after Harold died. It wouldn’t be respectful, Gus. It’s hardly a year.” And it would take me a hundred years to want to go out with you, I added to myself. Make that a thousand.

  “I can wait,” he said with a chuckle, and wiped a faint sweat sheen off his forehead with a chubby ringless hand. “You just call me when you’re ready,” he said with the great confidence of the clueless.

  I changed the subject and we discussed the riveting topic of his arthritis (he has a bit of it in his knees that worries him). Then I had to be fascinated by his speculation about whether the county would patch or repave the rural route leading to the bridge that’s out again before he went on to guessing how long the bridge will be out this time. Later, when he’d finished his coffee and left, Glitter Jesus stuffed behind the couch, I was tickled knowing Gus was burning up the phone line to Gary. He had to be secretly thinking Gary the least credible eye witness who’d ever asked for an unofficial official investigation in the twenty-seven years since Gus had first been elected sheriff of Dwayne Township. Miss Louisa was not only normal, she was kind of hot. Maybe CarolSue’s remedial lessons in hairstyle and makeup for the harried woman who lived on a farm and taught fifth grade hadn’t been entirely wasted.

  There was one true thing I’d said to Gus, though. It was about needing a solid focus. After a year at a standstill, something about having to rev my engine to put one over on him gave me an idea. Something I could do for my Harold, in Cody’s name. Sometimes you finally see something down the strangest, most out-of-the-way back road and you know it’s time to take that route. So while Gus was trying to find a smooth way to tell voter Gary that maybe he was the crazy one because his mother is just as fine and normal as pot roast, I got on the phone to CarolSue to say, “I need your help because it’s time to pick up Harold’s cause and get revenge on Cody’s killer. Only difference is we’re going to do it right. We’re going to have a Plan. None of that haphazard crap that didn’t work.”

  And CarolSue said to me, “Well, of course we will. And I’ve been bored to tears lately. Charlie’s always out in the garage, not that I want him underfoot, and I’ve already got the garden mulched. Annuals go in so early down here.”

  “Thank you, sister. I knew I could count on you.”

  “You have nothing to thank me for. You and I have to take care of each other, don’t we? I’ll be there. Haven’t I been saying you’ve got to find something to take hold of? And maybe there’s a little spark between you and Gus—”

  “Have you lost your mind? That just pisses me off, I mean—I am Harold’s wi—”

  “Okay, okay. I just thought . . .”

  “Well, don’t think about anything but a Plan.”

  * * *

  It was the middle of the night, too late to call CarolSue again, when a different thought came to me.

  After Gary’s visit, I’d reassured the girls that everything he said about getting them out of our house was nonsense and they absolutely shouldn’t trouble their minds. We laughed and drank a toast to what good company we are. And you know how the next morning went with Gus. I’d taken care of everything. I didn’t replay what Gary had said until my eyes opened in the blackness of my bedroom and The Thought was there, like one of those insights that you get with total clarity before sleep, but it fades in daylight and then you forget it until it’s too late. Months later I’d remember how Marvelle’s yellow eyes glinted at me from Harold’s side of the bed and The Thought had been sudden, strong. Gary wants me out.

  I lay there with The Thought. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I’d paid more attention to my instincts. Too late, I’d remember that I hadn’t been able to sleep for fretting. This is my farm, my land. Harold and I made it sing out its good heart year after year. Our sweat has been its best rain. Corn was its song and it sang and sang, through seasons of planting and harvesting. It fed our mouths, and through years of sunsets and dawns, it fed our souls. The animals we raised and loved are buried here. My Harold’s ashes are in this ground, with some of Cody’s that his mother was kind to give us. The land sings the only notes I still hear. And I hear, I still hear.

  Alan deCourcy

  The Book of CarolSue is Lynne Hugo’s ninth novel. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship recipient who has also received grants from the Ohio Arts Council and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Where the Trail Grows Faint, about animal-assisted therapy in a nursing home with a lively Lab, won the Riverteeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize. Her recent novels were A Matter of Mercy, which received the 2015 Independent Publishers Silver Medal for Best North-East Fiction, and Remember My Beauties. Born and educated in New England, Lynne and her husband now live in Ohio with Scout, a yellow Lab feared by squirrels in three states.

  You’re warmly invited to visit LynneHugo.com.