Behind the Bonehouse (5 page)

“What you mean is it's just because I'm a woman! You've got Richard and Spencer there, and—”

“That's not it at
all
. And having them both in the business has not been without considerable conflict and difficulties, and I don't intend to make it worse. It's not because you're a woman. No. It's what I've already said. Your talents are in museum work. You could teach about being a curator as well as doing it, and that's what you love. There's the library at Keeneland Racecourse too, and their archives are exceptional, with paintings and drawings as well as the documents, and they're talking about building a new facility that will—”

“The UK museum is very small, and it wouldn't pay much even if they hired me, and at Keeneland—”

“You get dividends on the stock we've given you. I know they're not large, but it's something, and Hal's paying reasonable support. It's a lot cheaper to rent a house here than it would be in Charleston.”

“I thought I could come home and get—”

“Taken care of? A place to live for free, and a job because you're my daughter, that you wouldn't have to work at very hard? I'm sorry to be so blunt, Martha, but that's not fair. I need to be alone here too. Mom and I raised three children. I don't have the energy to do it again, not when you're healthy and can care for them on your own. I love Jenny and Matt, but I have to have time alone. I'm still missin' your Mama, and I need to think and plan in quiet. I've also been having some trouble myself, though I haven't—”

“I never thought I'd be rejected by Hal and you too!” Martha burst into tears and ran out of the room, her thick curly bourbon-colored hair swinging around her shoulders the way it had when she was twelve, passing her son and daughter who'd come in quietly from the back hall in time to hear her yell.

Wednesday, August 7th, 1963

It was almost seven the following night when Booker came through the kitchen door saying, “Martha? Where are you, honey?” without getting an answer.

He threw his keys on the long maple table that'd come from his daddy's farm, and found two notes addressed to him waiting on the end near the sink.

Mary Treeter's note said she'd cleaned the upstairs and done the ironing and left him tuna-fish salad and green beans with bacon in covered dishes in the ice box, and that some fella named Ridgeway Peters wanted Booker to call him at home as soon as he got in.

The other note was from Martha. “I've taken your grandchildren out to dinner so we don't intrude on your solitude.”

Booker sighed, and walked down the hall that was open on the left the whole length of the gallery, then turned right into the front hall and stepped into Alice's office. It was his now, but largely unchanged. And he sank down into Alice's black leather swivel chair and phoned the lawyer they'd both trusted enough to put on their board of directors.

Booker heard what he'd hoped to hear—the new will and supplemental document were ready to sign, and Ridge would bring them to Booker first thing in the morning before they both went to work.

Booker thanked him, and listened to Ridgeway talk about the summer sales at Keeneland, and the two year old he'd bought. Then he hung up, and showered, and dished up his dinner from the fridge.

He ate it on the terrace in back, outside the gallery where Alice had painted her landscapes the three or four weeks she took each year away from her everyday work. He looked at the boxwoods they'd planted together the year they'd moved in. And he watched the birds swirling around him, on the feeders, sometimes, that he kept out year round, and in and out of the redbud trees too, that he and Alice had loved, and the woods beyond that screened his view, that belonged to the farm behind him.

He hadn't eaten much, but he still felt full and uncomfortable. And he told himself it was time to tell Spencer what he knew he was facing. He'd talked to him about the will at least, and he thought that had gone fairly well. He'd said he truly believed he loved all of them equally, and he wanted them all to benefit identically. But his main obligation, in terms of the business, was to make sure his responsibilities to everyone who worked there were lived up to as best he could.

He'd told Spencer that he knew Richard and Martha would be irritated with Spencer for what he'd done himself. But if anyone could make them see the wisdom of the decisions he'd made, it would be Spencer. And at least Spencer'd be able to do what was best for everyone who worked for Blue Grass Horse Vans as time went on.

He'd seen that Spencer had felt uncomfortable, not wanting to talk about planning for Booker's death, though all he'd said was he knew it was something Booker had to prepare for, but that he had years left, that his whole family lived to see ninety.

A hummingbird settled on the sugar-water feeder five feet away, and Booker held his breath and watched the light flash on the green-and-turquoise feathers on a bird smaller than his thumb. Even so, he didn't watch as intently as usual. His mind was on his family and truths he couldn't change.

He told himself he shouldn't be surprised
. It's one of the mysteries of life, the way genes come out so differently. The shape of the head skippin' a generation. Or the arches in someone's feet goin' to one, but not another. Or seeing things the same way someone else does, so you can talk to your uncle, but not to your own daddy. Or to one of your kids, and nobody else, not in the whole family.

Maybe if I get up and walk for awhile, I'll start to feel some better.

Booker stepped out his front door, heading straight east down his long drive toward Midway's main street. It was cooler after the shower that had come before he ate, and the lawn and the oaks lining the driveway, and the hydrangea bushes with their huge dark leaves tucked in the shade of the oak trees, looked less dusty and greener now than when he'd driven in.

He waved to old Miss Anna Eldrige, tending her azaleas across the street in her tiny front garden, and he told himself to sit on her porch and chat on his way home. He hadn't talked to Miss Anna since Martha'd moved in, and it was time he made the effort. There weren't too many left who knew her, and most of those couldn't get out on their own anymore, and had to wait for someone from church to drive them over for a visit.

Booker turned left toward the center of town, walking under the old trees on the west side of Main. They made him feel sheltered and calmer, though he couldn't have said why. Maybe the laciness, and the filtered evening light that dappled the cracked old stones in the sidewalk, and the soft green in the yards. It reminded him of walks with his grandmother, and with Alice too, through Midway, out past the horse farms on the south side, talking about their day at work, and how their horses were doing, and who was going to water the garden when they got home.

He was thinking he'd get him a pack of spearmint gum down in the center of town, as he walked past the Midway College president's house, all white-washed brick and pristine gardens as neat and tidy as Robert from the college had kept them for forty years.

Booker stayed on the west side of the next block too, and then crossed over to the east, where he stopped and stared in the window of Lehman's Antiques at an oval mahogany dining room table he knew nothing whatever about, except that it was a work of art that few could've made in his day.

He was feeling worse rather than better, even though he'd walked slowly and the evening had sunk into shade. Perspiration was running down his chest now, and nausea was sweeping through him. His left arm too had begun to ache, even before he reached inside the breast pocket of his shirt, and pulled out the small cardboard box that held his nitroglycerin. He'd taken two out, and was trying to get them under his tongue when a pain in his chest like a vise around his ribs knocked his knees out from under him, and threw him down onto the stone step in front of Lehman's door.

Mertie Mae Trasker was on the west side of Main, just across from Booker Franklin, coming up the hill from the railroad tracks, walking her collie after dinner, and she hollered out to poor Mr. Booker and hurried across the street.

He was dead when she got there, when she knelt down beside him. That's what she figured, but she chaffed his wrists anyway, repeating his name the whole time. The old tan-and-white collie was sniffing Booker's shoes when Mertie Mae tugged hard on her leash, and started trotting east toward home to call the county sheriff.

Excerpt From Jo Grant Munro's Journal

Thursday, August 8th, 1963

P
oor Booker. Poor Spencer. No one had any idea Booker was ill, and I can see Spencer worrying that there was something he should have noticed, or should have done, and didn't. I've invited him for dinner tomorrow, and I hope he'll actually come.

We had our own excitement here tonight. Bob Harrison appeared at eight o'clock, without calling ahead, which wasn't like him at all, saying he needed to talk to Alan.

They went into our farm office/library, and I took Emmy out to visit Sam to give them time alone. When I got back, Bob was gone, and Alan managed to look stunned, furious, and gratified at the same time while he told me that Bob's distributor in Canada had recorded Carl and Butch asking him to take the formulas for Alan's fungicidal products and manufacture them in Canada.

Carl claimed he'd developed them, which is so far from the truth it makes me crazy. But the larger issue, obviously, is it's clearly criminal behavior.

Alan and Bob are both hopping mad, but Alan thinks it's the treachery that's upset Bob most.

I'm not all that surprised with Carl, but I didn't expect it of Butch.

Friday, August 9th, 1963

Carl Seeger laid the heavy black metal receiver back in its oval cradle, telling himself again that Art Lawrence had a large territory and traveled most of the week, so it shouldn't be surprising that he hadn't returned his calls.

Carl stood behind the desk in his study, holding his smoke-colored Siamese cat in the crook of his left arm, stroking her back and listening to his wife put dishes away in the kitchen. He set Cassandra down on the old brown rug and lit a Lucky while he stared across the street toward the honey-colored stone house where Elinor Nevilleson was watering her roses and surveying her neighbors' houses as though she were responsible for decorum and civility, as well as all lawns and gardens.

Carl was planning what to say to her the next time she complained about Cassandra “defecating” in her perennials—when Bob Harrison's long black Chrysler turned into his drive.

Then he saw Harrison wasn't alone. His blond-headed stork of an attorney had unfolded his reed-like legs and was climbing out of the car, when Carl said, “Damn!” and crushed his Lucky in the plastic ashtray on his desk.
Garner Honeycutt. In a fine blue suit. Stickpin in his tie. Honeycutt, Honeycutt and Whipple. Coddlers of the rich. Defenders of the predators who prey on people like me!

That explains why Art hasn't called. The little turd's talked to Bob! But it's still his word against mine and Butch's, so it's far from over yet.

Bob Harrison had set a tape recorder on a side table in the living room, and was plugging it into the wall, when Jane Seeger walked in from the kitchen drying her hands on her apron.

“Hey, Bob. How are you? I didn't know you were coming over. Garner. My! I haven't seen you since you came into the UK library and made me drag out every volume of local history since 1826.”

Garner smiled, and said, “You always did exaggerate, Janie. It's good to see you too.” Then he looked at Carl Seeger, and Garner's long narrow face turned to chiseled stone.

Bob said, “I apologize for not calling ahead, Jane. But this is a business situation that Carl and I need to talk about away from the office.”

Jane studied her husband, her intelligent eyes probing his, her wavy brown hair damp along her forehead where she smoothed it back with one hand, before she untied her apron. “I'd like to hear what you have to say, Bob, if it's all right with you.”

Carl shook his head, before he said, “Bob wouldn't have come here if it wasn't a sensitive matter. Though I, for one, don't know what that could be.”

Jane looked at Bob and Garner, her plain pleasant face still and concentrated, as she sat at one end of the sofa. “No, Carl, I have a good idea it does affect me, and if they have no objection, I'd very much like to hear what Bob and Garner have to say. Why've you brought a tape recorder?”

Bob watched Jane for half a minute before he finally spoke. “I think maybe you
ought
to hear both sides of the story.” He took hold of one of the controls, then glanced over at Carl. “You may want to sit too. This will take several minutes.”

Carl crossed the room and stood by the fireplace, then rested an elbow on the white painted mantelpiece, after he'd lit a Lucky.

The tape played, while Bob and Garner stared at Carl, Garner sitting in a chair on the other side of the hearth from Carl, Bob standing by the tape recorder, Jane looking shocked, and then repulsed, as though she'd touched something vile.

Ten minutes into it, Carl said, “I think we've heard enough. I believe I do have the right to pursue the use of my own formulations outside the U.S.”

Jane said, “How could you steal Bob's formulas like that?”

“Don't comment on what you know nothing about!”

Garner handed Carl and Jane copies of Carl's employment contract, then settled himself in his chair. “Mr. Seeger, you are in violation of your noncompete, nondisclosure agreement as set forth in the employment document you signed when you went to work for Equine Pharmaceuticals.

“It clearly stipulates that you do not own any of the formulas you are asked to work upon, nor the trade secrets, nor any other information to which you are given access while at Equine Pharmaceuticals.