Homeplace (49 page)

“I didn’t want to have to tell you about your sister, in the first place. I guess I kept hoping that some miracle or other would happen. That they’d call off their road. And then, we didn’t really know you at first. You might have thought it was a great idea. You made no secret of the fact that you barely tolerated him at first, you know. And as for Sewell—I’m not a fool, Mike. I’ve been in love, too. Would you have believed me?”

Mike’s face flamed. She knew that she would not have.

“After a while I did want to tell you, after you’d swung over to his side,” Sam went on. “But he made me promise not to. On that old Bible of his father’s. Really. He said you’d had enough of family treachery. But I’m awfully glad J.W. had the sense and guts to
break his promise to me. I was going through hell; I couldn’t bear the thought that Sewell might get his hands on that land through you when he couldn’t get it his own way.”

And of course, he would have, Mike thought. He was headed that way. I was the queen of all the fools, not Daddy. She grimaced. Aloud, she said, “When did he change his will?”

“As soon as he could talk some, after the stroke. And then he asked for you to come home. He really did, Mike. He wanted a Winship to have the land. The right Winship.”

“So he found a way to save his land.”

“That’s not why he asked for you to come. He knew you were pretty apt to refuse it. He knew you might sell it or give it to DeeDee, whatever he did. It wasn’t for that he called you home.”

He looked up at Mike. She poured herself a fresh cup of coffee and wrapped her hands around it. She felt, somehow, cold and diminished.

“He wanted to make things up to you,” Sam said. “He never could find the words; he never could have said, ‘I’m sorry. I was wrong. I love you.’ But he tried to do it another way. He gave you what he loved best in this world, besides your mother. He spent the last three months of his life, in his own way, saying, ‘I love you.’ “

“All that time,” Mike whispered. “All that time, and I never even heard what he was saying. I thought he was just barely suffering me. I never said it to him, either … ‘I love you,’ I mean.”

“Yes, you did. You did, that day down at the homeplace when you asked if you could help him lick stamps. You couldn’t have said it any clearer. Didn’t you see his face?”

Mike began to cry again. Once again, she covered her face and wept for the father unknown, the father
new-given. Under the weeping was impatience. She had thought that she was done with tears.

“I’m awfully tired of crying,” she said at last to Sam Canaday, through her wet fingers.

“Me, too,” he said. “I wish you’d stop.”

Mike splashed her face at the sink and sat blearily back down at the table.

“There’s something else,” Sam said. “I’m telling you because J.W. says he’s going to if I don’t, and he shouldn’t have to. He’s pretty sure Sewell told your dad they were wrecking the house that afternoon. He believes he woke your dad up and told him before … he went on upstairs, hoping for just what he got, or something like it.” His face was grim.

“Before he came upstairs to my room!” Mike said, incandescent with fury. “Goddamn his murdering soul, I
will
write that story! I’ll run him clear out of Lytton! I’ll ruin him in the legislature; the closest he’ll ever get to the governor’s office is on public tour day …”

“And all you’ll get is a libel suit,” Sam said. “The papers would never print an unsubstantiated charge, and the legislature would never rat on one of its own. This is small potatoes to the Georgia legislature, Mike. And J.W. can’t prove it, of course, and Sewell could make things pretty hot for him in Lytton, if it got out that J.W. told me that. He still needs to work, even if he is landed gentry now. Let it alone. Bayard Sewell has lost his main chance, and he ain’t got a prayer of paying back that chunk of change the big boys have already given him. All he’s accomplished is to cost the state a road to nowhere. That’s enough to cook him in the so-called political arena. He’ll be lucky if he doesn’t wind up with his knee caps blown off in some dirt-road gravel pit in Coweta County. He’s had Sally Sewell on his back for twenty years, and now he’ll have Duck and DeeDee on his neck for the rest of his life. It’s enough. I wouldn’t be surprised if he packed up his toys and his
poor wife and left Lytton before long, anyway. From what you say, he’s hated the place all his life, and there’s sure nothing to hold him here now.”

“They’ll appeal the will, you know,” Mike said. It seemed impossible, on this jeweled morning, that they could be having this conversation.

“Let ‘em. It’s as airtight as the law can make it. I worked on it for a long time. I knew I couldn’t help him much against the DOT, but I
can
draw a right nice will. I even took the little precaution of hunting up two good shrinks and getting him to go see them so they could testify to his mental state, if they want to claim unsound mind. Getting him there was worth a year’s fee, believe me.

“Sam. You know I can’t pay you for what you’ve done for him. I don’t know when I can. I can’t even think of a way to thank you.”

“It was, as they say, my pleasure.” He was silent for a moment, and then said, softly, “Do you mind so much, Mike? About Sewell?”

“No,” she said unhesitatingly. She held his eyes with hers. “It happened to somebody else. And that’s not shock talking, or bravado. There’s not even going to be any delayed reaction. I’m sure of that. That simply happened to somebody who does not exist anymore.”

“Thank God for small favors,” he said. “That was a good-looking broad, but she was a real pain in the ass.”

Mike laughed. “Was she not,” she said.

“So then, what now?” Sam Canaday said. “You said the other night you were going to go back and get on with it; did you mean that?”

“I … don’t know,” Mike said. “I need some money. I’m almost out. I
could
go on back and round up some assignments …”

“But?”

“But … I think I really might have a book, Sam. Or rather, the beginning of one. It’s … I don’t know;
it’s not like any kind of writing I’ve ever done, and it’s terribly hard to do, and coming slow, and it would need an iron lung … but I think I really like it. I think I’d like to finish it. Whether anybody would want to print it, I have no idea. I could take it to the editor who was interested in the other book, and see if they’d give me another advance. At least, that way, I could pay back the first one.”

“Where would you write it?”

“I don’t know that either. I can’t raise the cost of a co-op in New York, but I might swing a little place, a sublet of some kind.”

“You might try writing it here,” he said, elaborately casual. “If it’s about Lytton, you might as well write it in Lytton.”

“Where on earth would I live? DeeDee’s going to want this house as soon as she can pack,” Mike said.

“She can’t legally take possession of it until the will is probated, and if they’re going to contest it, that’ll tie it up until kingdom come. And I can probably string it out even longer. You’d have plenty of time, time enough to write two books,” he said.

“No. I don’t want to stay in this house.” Mike surprised herself, but knew it was true. “This house never did feel like home to me, really, and with him gone, it’s going to feel even less so. Let Dee have it.”

He looked at her sharply. “You’re not having second thoughts about your inheritance, are you? No bright ideas about nobly turning it over to her after all?”

“Oh, no. Not that, not ever. Maybe I’m being hard and selfish, but I don’t think Dee …
deserves
that land. Not after what they did. Not that I’ve got an idea in the world what to do with it; what am I going to do with eighty acres of Georgia farmland? But I just couldn’t … but, Sam, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t deserve better than she’s got. She never meant to hurt Daddy. I’m sure of that. She might be greedy, but she
adored him. She’s going to be just—stricken about this, for the rest of her life.”

“She’ll be okay, if she’s careful,” Sam said. “She has this house, and the money the Colonel left her. She has a teaching certificate. I could help her.”

Mike laughed. “I doubt if she’d welcome your help,” she said. “But I can help her a little now by letting her move on in here. And maybe later I could help her some more. I think she just might turn herself into something, if she could dump Duck …”

“Well, now’s her chance. But don’t count on DeeDee changing much,” he said. “She’s been poor and unhappy a long time. It does permanent damage. It might be she’s just been too poor too long.”

“I don’t count on anything,” Mike said.

Sam Canaday said, “You know you can always stay with Priss for as long as you want. I’d offer you haven myself, but as you know, I live over the store. Or you could sell off your land, or some of it, and buy yourself a house. He really wouldn’t care.” He looked, not at her, but out the kitchen window, where J.W. was trailing the lawn mower back and forth, back and forth. They could not hear him over the mower’s noise, but they could see his mouth moving hugely, and knew that he was singing.

“No,” Mike said, with a swift, unbidden certainty that had the weight of a long-held belief. “I’m not going to sell the land. I don’t know where I’ll live, or even if I’ll come back here, but I’ll never sell that land. I need a place to be
from
, Sam. A homeplace of my own. And Rachel needs one, even if she never sees it. You can’t be
from
some sublet in the East Eighties, which is what I’ll have to settle for if I go back. I guess what I mean is—you’re free to wander only as long as you have a taproot. Without one, you can just—fly off the face of the earth, if you’re not careful. That’s what I’ve been trying to control all my life, I think … that awful feeling of
free flight. It can turn right into free fall. I know. I was in it. It was … terrible.”

“Well, you have a taproot now,” he said. “Okay, so you’re going to go back and see if you can get a book advance. And then?”

“I’m going out to the coast and get Rachel.” It was all falling into place now. Mike felt very clear in herself. “She’s got no business in that damned sex boutique out there. He’s no more a fit father than Roman Polanski. I’m going to go get her by her smartass little pierced ear and yank her home where she belongs.”

“And where’s that?” His voice was slow and soft.

“Someplace where she can go to public school and wear flipflops and cutoffs without somebody’s name on her ass,” Mike said. “Someplace with privacy and space and real trees and real people who aren’t in any danger of being chic. Someplace where I can write that isn’t my bedroom and where I can go to the grocery store without locking twelve locks. Someplace I can have a big dog and a big car. Do you know that I’ve never had a car of my own? I want a big Chevrolet station wagon.”

“I know a place like that,” Sam Canaday said. “About two miles down the road. Pretty land. No neighbors breathing down your neck. Trees. Creek. Woods. School bus goes right by there. Brand-new road, too. It wouldn’t take a lot to put up a nice house on it. It wouldn’t take more than—oh, what you’d make on a middling good book. How long do you figure it takes to write a book?”

“I don’t know,” Mike said. “I never wrote one. Maybe a year.”

“Hmmm,” he said. “A year. Long time, a year.” And then, “Oh, wait, I almost forgot. I’ve got something for you.”

“Something for me?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Just a minute.” And he was gone out of the kitchen. She heard his footsteps receding
down the hall toward her father’s bedroom, heard the door open and shut, heard the steps coming back down the hall, and then he was back in the kitchen once more, carrying a large cardboard box that said
J&B SCOTCH
on the side. He brought the box over to the kitchen table and set it down in front of Mike. She peered into it. Inside, a tiny, quivering, silky brown rabbit crouched, its miniature nose trembling tinily, in the palm of a new tan catcher’s mitt. The mitt was large and smelled wonderfully of leather and was stenciled with the name Rawlings.

Mike reached in very slowly and picked up the tiny creature and held it close under her chin, feeling the minuscule vibration of its terror and the incredible, small softness of it. It nestled close to her throat. A great, silly, trembling smile bloomed inside her; the corners of her mouth twitched with it. Sam reached into the box and plucked out the catcher’s mitt and put his hand into it.

“Good fit,” he said. “Nice leather.”

Still cradling the rabbit, she walked slowly around behind him, lifted her free hand, and put one finger lightly on the cowlick that whorled on the top of his blond head. Outside the September day seemed to shimmer.

“Will you be here a year from now?” Mike asked.

Sam Canaday tossed a cold doughnut into the air and caught it neatly behind him in the catcher’s mitt. He grinned his white wolfs grin.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I expect I will.”