Original Sins (84 page)
Authors: Lisa Alther
Two days later Jed was supposed to be managing Joey in Peewee Boxing at the new mall. But he didn't come home for supper. Joey cried. Sally couldn't understand it. It wasn't like Jed to disappoint the children. Toward midnight the highway patrol phoned
to
tell her Jed was dead in a car wreck with Betty Osborne in front of the Lazy Daze Motel.
The Creech's Funeral Home limousine pulled up to the curb in front of her parents' house. Her father had to ride downtown with them to pick up his own car, but they were letting her off so she could rest up before neighbors and relatives started arriving to comfort her. But it was no use. There was no such thing as a widowed Mrs. Tennessee.
She climbed out of the car and arranged her veil. On the sidewalk she saw the kids, and Raymond in his overalls. And Emily in her suit. And a tall mean-looking Negro man with wild frizzy hair and a black leather jacket, a child holding each hand. Sally saw herself through their eyes: Jed had left behind only a totaled T-Bird and an inboard he still owed money on. Here she'd quit her career for him, and where was he? Where was the only man she'd ever loved? Where was her best friend since childhood? Dead on the highway with another woman. While his own wife waited patiently and lovingly for him to come home. Every night she'd crawl into that big cold empty bed by herself.
As she walked toward the group on the sidewalk, she sniffed and dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief. She comforted herself with the thought that in a few weeks she'd call the reporter at the
News
who'd written “Sally Tatro at Home” and offer him an exclusive interview. He could call it something like “Portrait of a Bereaved Widow.”
Emily and Raymond, Matt and Joey and Laura were standing on the Princes' sidewalk as a car pulled up to the curb. A black man in a short leather jacket with a lot of flaps and zippers and snaps got out, along with two children.
“I'm sorry,” he murmured as he approached. “I come for Grandmaw's tree and all. But I reckon I timed it bad.”
“Hi, Donny,” said Emily. “How are things?”
Emily, then Raymond, extended hands to Donny, who shook them quickly.
“Didn't hardly recognize you,” Donny murmured to Emily. He turned to Raymond. “Heard about Jed. I'm real sorry.”
“Yeah, it's a big shock. These two is his kids.”
“Used to know your daddy,” he said to the children. “He was a real fine man.” Joey and Laura stared at his bushy head with wonder.
“How's Ruby?” asked Emily.
“She just fine.”
Another limousine arrived at the curb. Sally stepped out, dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief, and arranged her veil. As she walked up to them, she said in a wan voice, “Oh, how nice to see you, Donny. I didn't recognize you at first.”
“Real sorry about Jed.”
“Thank you.” She sighed. “Me too, Donny. Me too.”
As they discussed Christmas, the weather, each other's families in the quiet polite manner they'd been trained in and had never quite managed to shed, they eyed each other. The children clung to their parents' hands and stared at each other, half-hidden by coat sleeves. Eventually Joey stuck out his tongue at Matt. Then Nicole offered Laura a stick of Beech-Nut.
Suddenly Joey yelled, “Last one to the top of that tree's an old rotten egg! Everyone included!” He shot across the yard, the others chasing after him, Isaac bringing up the rear.
The adults watched the straggly line of five stumbling children weave across the frost-stiffened grass of the neighboring yard toward the Castle Tree. A new ranch house sat behind the bare tree, in what had been Mr. Fulton's side field. The children's shrieks of laughter filled the still winter afternoon. Their frosty breath puffed up like Indian smoke signals. The small bodies, dark splotches against the overcast sky, began their ascent of the skeletal branches.
“Be careful!” Emily called. “Don't climb too fast, or you'll fall!”
“Nicole, watch out for Isaac!” yelled Donny.
No one in the tree listened, as they dragged themselves from branch to branch.
Finally assembled like crows in the branches, the children began cawing down at the adults, “Ha, ha! Yall four is rotten eggs! Rotten eggs! Rotten eggs!”
The adults glanced at each other with faint smiles. Emily said to Donny, “Can you come in?”
“Naw, I got to get on back home. Grandmaw's waiting on us. But thanks.”
“I'll get Ruby's stuff.” She went into the house.
Sally asked Raymond, “Do you think it's all right for them to be doing that at a time like this?”
Raymond shrugged. “They're just kids. Don't have no idea what's going on. Let them have some fun if they can.”
“But what'll the neighbors think?”
“Fuck the neighbors.”
Donny gave a startled guffaw.
Emily emerged, completely hidden behind a small cedar tree on a stand and a grocery bag of gifts. She set down the tree, handed Donny the bag, and reached in her suit coat for an envelope. Handing him the envelope, she blushed and laughed. “What can I say?”
Donny smiled. “Ain't nothing
to
say.”
“About what?” inquired Sally.
The children lost interest in tormenting their parents and began gazing around them through the bare twisted branches at the town, spread out below them like a toy village.
“Yonder's my house,” pointed Joey.
“There's Grandmaw's,” said Nicole.
“Probably New York is over there,” announced Matt, gesturing to the mountain ranges that heaved and rippled off into North Carolina. “New York's better than here.”
“Ain't neither,” snarled Joey.
“Is so.”
“Ain't.”
“Is so.”
“What's a-b-s-c-e-s-s mean?” asked Laura, who was studying the word carved into the limb beside her.
“Let me see,” commanded Joey, scrambling on to the Throne and studying the footrest of the Couch. He ran his fingers over the swollen cuts in the bark. “Says absent,” he announced. “Like when you stay home from school.” The others nodded.
“Look at them,” said Matt, nodding disdainfully at the landbound adults. “Couldn't climb up here to save their lives.”
“Big old clumsy things,” agreed Nicole.
“Yeah,” said Joey, “we could sit up here all week, and they couldn't do nothing about it!”
They shouted with laughter.
The adults looked up. “What's so funny?” Raymond called.
“Yall look like toy soldiers!” yelled Joey.
“Can't catch us, Daddy!” taunted Isaac.
Abruptly the sun broke through the racing clouds. Shafts of sunlight pierced the bare tree. Whispers and giggles floated down from the topmost branches.
Raymond murmured, “It's a hell of a way to run a world, ain't it?”
“Gon be different for them,” announced Donny, nodding his bushy head toward the tree.
“Damn right,” snarled Emily.
“Lots of luck,” muttered Raymond.
“What is?” asked Sally.
A gust of wind swirled across the yard. The long twisted branches of the tree swayed and beckoned like fingers on the outstretched hand of a wise old witch.
For novelist Lisa Alther, as for so many of her fellow Southerners, the past is ever present, particularly in places like Kingsport, Tennessee, the small town where she was born in 1944. One of five children, Alther grew up in a region known for its coal mining and factories, surrounded by a close-knit Appalachian community. Her father was a second-generation town doctor, and her mother was a former English teacher from upstate New York. Another strong presence in her upbringing was her paternal grandmother, the founder of the Virginia Club and a pillar of the Southern way of life. Lisa attended public schools in Kingsport, taking her place in the marching band after an unsuccessful brush with flag swinging, living the typical life of a 1950s teen.
Alther left Tennessee to attend Wellesley College and moved to New York after graduation in 1966 to work in book publishing at Atheneum. During college she met a Cornell co-ed, Richard Alther, whom she later married. Their daughter, Sara, was born in 1968. The family moved to Vermont, where Richard pursued his painting. In the years that followed, Alther began writing journalism pieces, but inspired by the great Southern women writers and storytellers, she also worked on novels. After many rejections, her first novel,
Kinflicks
was published in 1976 to critical praise and became a bestseller.
Kinflicks
was the first of six bestselling novels: The others were
Original Sins
(1982),
Other Women
(1984),
Bedrock
(1990),
Birdman and the Dancer
(1993), and
Five Minutes in Heaven
(1995). Alther also taught Southern fiction at St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vermont, and produced one work of nonfiction,
Kinfolks: Falling Off the Family Tree
. For
Kinfolks
(2007), she researched her family's possible connection to the Melungeon people, a little-known population in eastern Tennessee and southern Virginia whose ethnic origins are unclear but may be traced to Portuguese, Spanish, or Turkish sailors who integrated with the Cherokee people in the seventeenth century.
Following her divorce, Alther remained in Vermont, where she has lived now for over thirty years. She has written novels set both in the South and in her adopted northern home, and takes inspiration from both her past and present neighbors and family. Her novels feature a comic wit that addresses human foibles as gracefully as her more serious prose tackles weightier topics such as racism, feminism, domestic abuse, politics, and sexuality. Her work aims “to portray the human reality behind the cultural stereotypes, particularly those regarding women.”
Alther divides her time between Vermont and New York City.
A baby Alther on July 23, 1945, sitting at the edge of Conesus Lake in New York.
Alther in 1948, at age four.
An eight-year-old Alther in June of 1952.
