Homeplace (44 page)

The people who came were all kind, and Mike recalled a few of them, but no one seemed to want to tell her they remembered her when she was knee-high to a duck, or remark that she looked just like her father. A handful complimented her on her writing and asked when she was going back to New York. Mike smiled and said, over and over, “Thank you for coming. It would have pleased Daddy a lot to have you here.” They all seemed glad to escape to the more vocal and accessible DeeDee. New York hung, dense and impenetrable, in the room between Mike and them.

More than once, Mike found herself looking around the room, and she realized finally that she was looking for Sam Canaday. But he did not appear. She knew that he would not, that he felt that this day was for family and old friends, but there was a void where his stocky figure should be. Under the dullness and fatigue, Mike felt uneasy.

They gathered in the kitchen in the dusk, after the last caller had left. DeeDee, restored and proprietary, tackled a plate of ham and potato salad, and Duck tucked into chicken pie. Bay Sewell drank coffee, watching them, his eyes holding Mike’s now and then. “Soon,” the blue eyes said. “Soon.”

She went upstairs to change into a dress that DeeDee would deem suitable for sitting up with the dead, and when she came back into the room they were discussing her father’s funeral. Priss had set it for the following afternoon, and had phoned the announcement in to the local and Atlanta papers and alerted the young jogging minister Mike had met with Sam and her father … was it only a month ago? But they had settled on no details up to now.

Brushing aside her unaccustomed linen skirts, Mike
sank into a kitchen chair and listened, astounded, as DeeDee outlined a mountebank’s funeral, ticking off one rococo horror after another: open casket at the foot of the altar, banks of flowers, a full choir, honorary pallbearers by the dozen, the full pantheon of Methodist hymns, texts, and eulogies. A policeman on duty at both the funeral home and church to handle traffic, and a motorcycle escort to the old Lytton cemetery, where John Winship would rest, finally, beside his beloved Claudia and his parents. And then another graveside service. Duck grinned and nodded his approval as she talked. Priss and Bayard Sewell, like Mike, simply watched her. J.W. Cromie, coming in with another armful of floral arrangements, leaned against the kitchen, counter and listened too, his opaque eyes stonelike and unreadable.

DeeDee stopped for breath, and Mike took a deep breath. Where ice had packed her heart before, now molten lava flowed.

“You forgot the photo opportunities,” she said. “Or, how about a funeral pyre? Fireworks, maybe?”

DeeDee whirled on her.

“If you don’t like it, go back to New York with your sophisticated bohemian gang of … trash,” she hissed furiously. “Where do you get off prissing down here and telling me how to bury my daddy? You couldn’t even look after him; you couldn’t even keep him from getting
killed;
you haven’t lifted a finger for him since you broke his heart wallowing around with the niggers twenty-five years ago! Go on back up there and squirm around in some more beds …”

“Shut up, DeeDee,” Bayard Sewell said in a soft, dangerous voice. DeeDee looked sidewise at him, red-faced with rage, but she dropped her eyes and snapped her mouth shut.

“Don’t you talk to my wife like that!” Duck Wingo said truculently.

“Shut up, all of you, for God’s sake,” Priss Comfort growled in her beautiful bronze voice. “DeeDee, hold your flapping tongue. You ought to thank your lucky stars your sister came down here; you’d have been in a fine fix if she hadn’t. Mike, I know how you feel, but DeeDee is right about the funeral. God knows it’s not your way or mine or even Scamp’s, but it’s Lytton’s way, and that’s what we ought to give him. He’s earned a little pomp and circumstance. Duck, sit down and shut
up. “

Duck sat.

“All right,” Mike said reluctantly. She was very tired. The night ahead of her, and the day after that, loomed enormously; she could not see beyond them. “But I want you to okay every step and every detail, Priss.”

“That’s fine with me.” DeeDee shrugged. She gazed sullenly at the kitchen floor for a moment longer, and then she looked up at Mike and smiled, a wavering, propitiatory smile.

“But now Mikie, really,” she said. “I know you’ve got to get on with your life. You’ve given up a whole summer already; your work must be just piling up. And Rachel will be coming home to start school. You’ve been just wonderful help; we truly couldn’t have managed without you, but it would be selfish to keep you any longer, even though we’d all love it if you’d stay forever, of course … but you really must feel free to go on back as soon as the funeral’s over. J.W. and Priss will help us out, and Bay will …”

She looked earnestly around the room at one and then another of them. Bayard Sewell nodded, but his eyes were on Mike. Later, they promised. We’ll talk later.

J.W. did not look at DeeDee. He stared steadily at Mike.

“Maybe Mike would like to stay on just a little while
in her home,” Priss said dryly. “Until she can get herself together. Or were you planning on moving right in, DeeDee?”

“Why … no. Of course not. Not right yet,” DeeDee said.

Mike was surprised at the feeling of loss that flooded her. Of course DeeDee had inherited their father’s house; she had known that from the start of the summer. Of course she would want to live in it, rather than that flimsy shotgun horror she had lived in with Duck for so many years. And she herself had never planned to stay on in Lytton. Had she? Mike shut out the image of Duck Wingo in her father’s chair at the dining table, in the big double bed that had once been John and Claudia Winship’s.

“I guess I do need to get on with it, Dee,” she said. “And you’re right. There’s really no reason to stay now, is there?”

She did not look at Bayard Sewell as she left the room to go out to her father’s Cadillac in the driveway and drive to the funeral home. He did not speak. Well, of course, she thought, shutting the door behind her. He can’t. Not in front of everybody.

Much later that night, when she came wearily into her bedroom after saying good night to Priss Comfort, she turned back her freshly made bed and found a note on the pillow beneath the bedspread.

“Roses are red and violets are blue,” it said.

“All naked ladies should look like you.”

It was not signed, but the nauseatingly ubiquitous little smiling circle had been penciled in at the bottom, with a salacious leer on its face, and she recognized Sam Canaday’s spiky, sprawling handwriting.

Mike crawled into her bed and turned out the light and clutched the note to her breast, and once again, she cried.

A
T FIVE FIFTEEN THE NEXT MORNING, ON THE DAY OF
J
OHN
Winship’s funeral, J.W. Cromie knocked once more at Mike’s bedroom door.

Mike came instantly awake out of skeins and webs of sweating dreams, her heart knocking with fatigue and alarm, her hair in wet strings at the back of her neck. She was at the door in a moment, clutching her robe around her.

“Priss?” she called out softly.

“J.W., Mike. Can I come in?”

She opened the door and he came silently into the bedroom and walked over to the window and raised the
Venetian
blinds as if he had been in the room many times before. Soft gray light filtered in. Somehow, even in the chill of the air conditioner, the budding morning looked hot.

J.W. stood with his back to Mike and looked for long moments over the emerging front lawn of John Winship’s house. It was neat and trimmed and raked and mowed; he had done all that the day before, in preparation for the people who would stream through the house this afternoon, after her father’s funeral. Mike wondered if he had ever before been able to see his own
handiwork from the vantage point that those who lived in the house did.

“I need to tell you something, Mike,” he said. He did not go on, and she sat down on the edge of the bed, dread beginning in the pit of her stomach. She sensed that this was going to be bad. But what could there be left? The worst had already happened; was over.

“You’d better go ahead and tell me, then,” she said.

“I didn’t want to tell you this,” he said. “But I think you got to know. And there ain’t no more time. DeeDee and Duck been planning to get that house tore down an’ a road put in there for more than a year. Maybe even longer. I do yard work for DeeDee some, and that’s when I first heard ‘em talkin’ about it, when they didn’t know I was there. After that I listened whenever I could. They ain’t been too careful about talkin’. Don’t reckon they think I got sense enough to know what they’re sayin’. They stopped askin’ me to do work for ‘em about the time you come home, so I ain’t heard any more than that, but I’m sure of what I did hear.”

Mike could not think of anything to say. Nothing seemed to track. She stared at this black man whom she had known all her life, totally strange to her now, in silhouette against the lightening sky.

“How could they do that?” she said numbly, conversationally. “They don’t have any … power, any clout. Who would listen to them? And why?
Why?
What earthly good could it do them, a road to nowhere?”

“I ain’t sure,” J.W. said, not turning from the window. “Soun’ like there’s gon’ be some kind of big sale of that land when DeeDee gets it … now, I guess, with Mr. John gone. They standin’ to make a lot of money. Heard ‘em talkin’ about what they gon’ do with it. It gon’ be one big chunk of change if they sell off yo’ daddy’s land to some big developer wantin’ to put up houses or a factory or somethin’. I don’t know who in it
with ‘em. I listened all I could, but they never did say. Got to be somebody big, though, could get that road in and the house tore down.”

“But … how could they? They didn’t own that land. DeeDee didn’t own it. Not till Daddy … but he
did
die, didn’t he? How could they possibly know all that long ago that the land would … be theirs?”

“It don’t take magic to figure a sick old man ain’t gon’ live long. Specially if he frettin’ and grievin’ over somethin’ like he done that house.”

“Did … did you tell Daddy? Who else did you tell? Why didn’t you tell me about it?”

Her voice in her ears sounded querulous and whining. He turned to face her, and she saw that his face was drawn to bone and his black eyes swollen.

“I didn’t tell your daddy. No. I knew it would kill him to find out DeeDee would do that. I only told one other person, Sam Canaday. I didn’t tell nobody else because he made me promise I wouldn’t. Especially not you, Mike, when we knowed you was coming. He didn’t know you back then, he didn’t know whose side you’d be on. And later, I think he didn’t want to hurt you. He knew DeeDee raised you, practically. I think he wanted you to have some family left.”

“I never would have known,” she said in simple wonder. “I never would have, if you hadn’t told me. Why did you break your promise to Sam, J.W.?”

“You never did see us plain, Mike,” J.W. Cromie said. “Not any of us. I didn’t want you to leave here again without seein’ them two plain, like they really are. Even though they got what they were after, and we can’t do nothin’ about that, I just wanted you to
know
‘em. Your daddy deserved better than that. You do, too. I thought for a while that maybe you’d stay on here; he’d have loved that. To have his girl at home after he was gone … the girl he never did stop mournin’. I saw him every day of his life after you left. I know how
he felt. I wouldn’t have told you about this if you’d have been goin’ to stay, but then you said you were goin’ back … and so I did.”

He leaned against the thrumming air conditioner as though he were so tired that his two legs could not support him any longer, and put his hands into the pockets of his work pants.

“Might be I should have waited until after this afternoon,” he said. “But I didn’t want you feelin’ sorry for them when they get to cryin’ an’ carryin’ on over him in that church. I figure you ain’t gon’ break down now.”

“No,” Mike whispered. “Not now.”

Neither moved for a long time, and then Mike went to him across the soured, thin old carpet and simply laid her head on his chest. He was still, and then he put his arms around her and held her lightly.

“Thank you, J.W.,” Mike said.

“You’re welcome, Mike.”

Presently he went across to the door as softly as he had come, and slipped out and closed it. Mike dressed in the hot dawn silence and went quietly down the stairs so as not to waken Priss Comfort, asleep in John Winship’s back bedroom, and out to the car and drove to the mean little house on the edge of the mobile home park to confront her older sister.

Mike knew that soon she was going to be very angry, worse than angry: furious, red and murderous with rage, maddened with it. But for the moment, rage was frozen under the ice of disbelief. As she drove, she hoped simply and fervently, as a child will hope for something, that the rage would not break through until she had seen her sister and the dreadful, trivial, blustering man she had married and was home again. She did not know what she was going to say to DeeDee and Duck, but it was the most important thing in the world at this moment that she say it, that it be said, and then be over. Then, Mike thought, I can leave; I can go away
from here. When she had been very small and had had to be taken to old Dr. Gaddis for one of the childhood shots, of which she was terrified, Mike had comforted herself by sobbing to herself, over and over, “And then and then and then, it will all be over. And then and then and then.” She was doing that now, as she drove the silent old Cadillac: “And then and then and then.”

DeeDee and Duck were sitting at the round, varnished yellow pine table in what DeeDee called the breakfast nook. DeeDee wore a vast, knee-length, no-color duster and rubber flipflops. Her hair had not been combed, and her great face was swollen almost unrecognizably from hours and hours of crying; her lovely blue eyes had vanished almost completely, and the skin of her face was streaked and mottled with angry red. She was drinking coffee from a mug with Kermit the Frog on it, and breathing wetly through her mouth. Her small, inflamed nose seemed to be completely blocked with the dregs of grief. Duck wore nothing but his undershorts. If Mike had been able to focus her eyes clearly, she would have been repelled by his sagging fatness, the gross ruin of him. But she could see nothing but her sister’s face. She walked stiffly into the breakfast nook, her hands clenched at her sides, the car keys biting deeply and unheeded into her bandaged palm.