A Gracious Plenty (2 page)

“People’s saying you crazy,” Leonard hollers out.

“Can you arrest me for that?”

“Leave her alone, Finch,” he says, and shakes the gate to let me know he’s serious. And
mean
. He tries so hard to be mean.

But Leonard’s guts quiver whenever I’m around. Everybody knows it. He’s been scared of me since the day he walked into first grade and found the desk assigned to him, the one with “Leonard Livingston” written in block letters on red construction paper and taped to the wood. He was short for his age even then, and already shaped more like an egg than a boy. He placed his theme book in the space beneath his chair, his pencil in the groove cut into the wood, and then he turned my way.

I have a picture of the way I looked that morning. Ma had cut my curly hair short, parted it in the middle, and pulled it back with clips to either side. I had on a new blue dress with smocking at the top, and I was smiling—at least in the picture. But one whole cheek and jaw dripped into my neck, which dripped into my collar, and dribbled down my arm. It must have looked that way to Leonard the first time he saw me.

For when Leonard saw me, he startled, and his face dissolved, too—into a slow pout—and then he jumped back and was crying and running toward the wall.

I just stared at him. I knew who he was already. He was the mayor’s oldest son. Every Christmas, we got a card with a picture of his family on the front. Ma had shown me the card that morning before I left for school so I’d recognize somebody.

“His name’s Leonard junior,” she’d said. “I can’t remember the baby’s name, but he’s a boy, too.”

The teacher didn’t move him on the first day, and Leonard cried until his eyes swoll shut. But on the second day, his mother came into the room, and then Leonard got a new seat, next to the windows, with the students whose last names began with
A
’s and
B
’s. I also recognized his mother, except in the picture, like Leonard, she smiled.

It was years before I looked back into Leonard Livingston’s face. By then, I hated him.

He told me when we were nearly grown how sorry he was about that first day of school. I should’ve had pity on him. He was an outcast, too—fat, short, whiny—everything the mayor wouldn’t want in a son. He was already destined to disappoint, almost as rejected as me. You’d think I could have sympathized. But I didn’t.

And I don’t sympathize with him much now, cranking up his old police car. He needs a new line. He comes by saying the same thing almost every day.

I
T WAS BACK
four years ago when we first got word of Lucy’s death. The whole community grieved when they heard how she’d been shot, how her body was being flown home for burial.

“Why, I remember that little girl,” Papa said. He was still alive then, but withered with arthritis and age. He sat in his special electric chair and fiddled with the buttons, moving up and down as he reminisced. “Lord, she was pretty, with that curly blond hair.
You
remember her, Finch. She won ever beauty pageant around when she was small.”

“I don’t think I know who she was,” I answered, rubbing his twisted feet with Penetrol.

“Oh, sure you do. Remember the time the Vice President came to town—after the tornadoes came through? She was the little girl who sang the national anthem. Stood right up on the overturned trunk of that big oak in front of the library and sung like a lark. I’m sorry she met such a miserable end.”

National anthem. National anthem. I couldn’t remember ever hearing a little girl sing it.

“You say she’s been murdered?” Miss Ashley Dugan asked me. She was visiting her husband’s grave on the same day Lucy’s was being dug. “I taught that child back fifteen, twenty years ago. I believe I had her for third grade. That just breaks my heart—she had such promise. And oh, she was funny, too. She wore tap shoes all the time. She danced
every-where
she went.”

I tried to remember the shoes. It seemed like I should remember the shoes.

“Oh mercy.” The funeral director sighed. “It’s a sad day when you close the eyes of somebody as sweet-natured as that girl for the last time. Why, I remember when her mother came around asking for sponsorships to send her to a dance competition. She could clog like nobody’s business, but her family didn’t have much money to spare. She came home with a trophy from that contest, too, and she brought it to us to keep in our family lounge. Bless her soul.”

“You’ve seen her picture, Finch,” one of the grave diggers insisted. “When she first ran away from home, they stapled flyers to all the light poles and ran her senior picture in the paper for a week. You had to see it. Everybody thought she’d been kidnapped.”

“Shoot,” another one said. “I can’t believe she’s gone,” and he wiped a tear from his red cheek. “I went to
church
to sit next to that girl. I got saved six times just so she’d hug me. She was so pretty, the flowers bowed their heads when she went by.”

But I didn’t know her, and what I heard about her, I didn’t like. I couldn’t remember her at all. I recognized her house over on Glass Street. I reckon I must have seen her the way I see the other children, playing handball in the streets, or roller-skating down the sidewalk, and later, when they’re teenagers, pushing around baby carriages or, maybe if they’re smart, toting armfuls of library books. I must have seen her when she was small. She grew up a few streets away. But she was younger than me, a baby when I was in my teens. And she was unscorched. If I ever knew her, I paid her the same attention I pay all these other brats who scream and fight and light their cherry bombs in the streets. Which is to say none.

I have never invested much in beauty or trusted in sweetness. By the time she actually arrived, I was fairly unhappy about sharing my cemetery
with
her. It seemed for a while like people just loved her too much.

According to her marker, she was born on Christmas day in ’69. According to her marker, her name was Lucille Armour. Lucille Armour the beauty queen.

I had her pictured all wrong.

“I never liked that name,” she told me the first time we talked. “I hated the way it clanked off my tongue. All those sharp angles—”

“But
Lucy Armageddon?
” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said whimsically. “Lucy Armageddon. Now that’s a name I can wear.”

She told me that she’d changed her name legally five years before she died, but her family didn’t like it. “I wanted to be somebody
else
,” she said. “I wanted to be somebody less lovely, more authentic.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that her family hadn’t told the engravers about her new, authentic name.

Her stone is small and new—just two years old—because a temporary marker kept her plot for the first couple of years after she came here. I have it in my garden, the small copper plaque with her name, buried in jonquils. Lucy only got a permanent stone after the adult men’s Sunday school class took up collections. Her mother won’t work for fear of seizures and her father is bad to drink.

“Can you believe that?” she asked me when we’d known each other for a few weeks. “I don’t even get a stone. My parents have no shame.”

“They got no
money
,” I told her.

“They find money for things that are important,” she replied. “Do you remember when I won the state baton-twirling championship?”

I shook my head no.

“You don’t?”

“No.”

And she laughed. “Well, anyway, Mama found money to send me to baton classes every day for the month beforehand. Because she wanted me to
win
. And you’ve seen all the pictures of me in all my dance costumes, haven’t you?”

“No,” I told her.

“Oh really? They’re up in the auditorium. I guess they’re still up. Well, anyway, she found money for the pictures because she thought she was going to get a modeling agency to take me on.”

“I guess they just can’t find money for a tombstone,” I told her. “They’re awful expensive.”

But I didn’t give a rip about her baton twirling or her tap dancing or her pictures either one. I liked the part of her that left all that. The part of her that changed her name and sliced her beautiful body so it would be more than just beautiful.

What binds us is the scars. Mine from burns, hers from a knife, and both of us numbed by it.

The day after her burial, I was picking the dead flowers out of her funeral spray while the Mediator was welcoming Lucille Armour. I wanted to get a peek at the beauty queen anyway, the girl who everybody loved.

So I worked right above them, plucking through greenery while the Mediator and Lucy sat Indian-style, facing each other on the silky cushions of her coffin.

“She’s not dead, is she?” Lucy asked the Mediator, and pointed right at me. “That’s why she looks so thick?”

“Yes,” the Mediator told her, and she was about to explain the way I move in and out of their world when Lucy announced, “She looks like she was skinned alive. What happened to her face?”

“Burned,” I answered, and smiled at her and went back to my work, cleaning out the carnations.

Lucy slumped back for a second, cowering in her bed. She looked to the Mediator, who was cutting her eyes up at me.

“Finch,” the Mediator scolded. “I’ve told you over and over not to speak until I’ve explained the exceptions to the new folks.”

“Sorry,” I replied.

Then Lucy said, “Whew. Impressive scarring. Stop by later and I’ll show you mine.”

“Okay,” I said, wondering what kind of scars beauty queens get. Little blisters from high heels on the backs of ankles?

And I moved on to trim a boxwood, since I had my clippers out.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the new girl. She didn’t look much like a beauty queen, and I couldn’t figure out why. Usually the Mediator coaxes the body back to its predeath state when she first arrives at the coffin, before she opens it or wakes the person up. It scares a body to wake with holes in the head, with Y incisions stitched haphazardly along the torso after an autopsy. And while the hole in Lucille Armour’s head had been filled in, her hair looked like a rat’s nest. I wondered if there was a problem.

Later that day, I returned to Lucy’s grave, and I’ve visited her every day since. She’s my first real friend. She doesn’t have a beautiful spot, but I’ve planted a weeping willow. It’s skinny and slumps, but it’s finally growing. I think that in time it may thrive. I sit beneath the new tree and tell her how it will shade her in summer, blanket her in winter, how the leaves will be a canopy for her one day soon.

“But yesterday, some boys climbed under the fence and broke off the tree I planted behind Hallie McBride. That tree cost me thirty dollars. I ought to find the little fools who broke it and beat ’em with it till the leaves fall off.”

“Remember your blood pressure,” Lucy jokes, then adds more seriously, “You shouldn’t hate these children.”

“They hate
me
. They try to tear up
every
thing I got.”

“You’ll be sorry,” she says. “When you see the bigger picture, you’ll feel bad.”

“You hated me, too,” I say, defending myself. “Don’t get self-righteous on me.”

“Sorry,” she mutters.

And I get a little sad, and I tell her a thing I don’t much say aloud. “These children—they’re so afraid.”

Then she tells me a memory: seven years old, in her bathing suit and tap shoes, curly-headed and lean. She had a cardboard box, and inside it, a kitten she couldn’t keep. “Done got two dogs,” her daddy had said. “Find it another home.”

So Lucy was carrying it down the street, asking everybody she saw if they wanted a kitten.

When it grew late and nobody had taken the kitten home, she began calling like a circus vendor, “Free kitten, free kitten.”

And apparently I heard her, though I don’t remember. Lucy says we met near the firehouse, but I have no recollection. She tells me that I asked to see the free kitten, and that I asked her questions about where it came from (the woodpile) and why she couldn’t keep it (her daddy said so). She tells me I asked her name and she told me, and that all the time I was asking questions, she was staring at my shoes.

That’s what she remembers. My shoes! Red canvas sneakers fading to pink and folded-over blue kneesocks, she says.

“You remember my feet more than my face?” I ask her.

“No,” she admits, sheepish. “But, Finch, you can’t blame a child for that. You gotta remember—you
look
different. Naturally, a child will react. But when you yell, you show them that they’re right to fear you, so they go on fearing and hating people different from them. Now is that what you want?”

That Lucy. Those words. She’s not always the voice of wisdom, but sometimes she says things just right. And I wish I’d known her sooner, when I could have kissed her face and she could have wiped mine dry.

I don’t recall the shoes or socks, the cat I took home, or the child Lucille. I’ve worn so many pairs of shoes and fed a thousand strays. But I wish I’d remembered Lucy. Lucy, who dreamed for nights after of my melted face, of kittens that scratched and clawed. Lucy, who hitchhiked to Richmond on graduation night and took a bus to D.C.; who ran from the pageant life and her mama’s instructions, “Just smile!”; who ran from her daddy to men so much worse; who came home in a zippered bag. I wish I’d remembered
her
.

Technically, I could be her mother—my body could have done it as surely as Lois Armour’s did. But I’m not her mother, and Lucy was already old when she died. Old like me. Marked like me. Skin raised keloid, the slight purple of slugs. We have so much in common that sharing my voice with her is a natural instinct. I have taken her in.

And I don’t torment her mother. I whisper one word.
Suicide
. I whisper it on the street, in the grocery line, at the polls on voting days. Whenever I see her, I say it beneath my breath.
Suicide
. I say it for Lucy.

Something is driving Lois Armour crazy, all right. But that something isn’t me.