Somewhere Safe With Somebody Good (5 page)

They stared at a black limo moving north on Main, the driver in uniform.

J.C. gawked. ‘Who do you think that is?’

‘A tourist with money to burn,’ he said, walking.

‘Didn’t look like Ed Coffey at th’ wheel.’

Ed Coffey, liveried to the max, had driven Edith Mallory for years in a black Lincoln town car with tinted windows. ‘Ed Coffey’s in Florida with Edith,’ he said. ‘I hear she’s having a tough recovery.’

He remembered the inferno boiling into the night sky, and the looping shriek of fire engines. He’d run out to the street and looked at the ridge above Fernbank where Edith Mallory’s Clear Day was ablaze. By the time their local engine and a backup from Wesley hacked through the overhanging rhododendron, the house was destroyed and Edith had suffered a severe head injury.

‘Is she talking yet?’ asked J.C.

‘We had a card from her when we got home. Said she’s doing better.’
Doing better
,
she had written,
pray for me
.

‘I guess you heard what’s going on at Lord’s Chapel?’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Actually, nobody really knows, but rumors are flyin’. The story I get is—’

‘I don’t want to hear it,’ he said. ‘I keep my nose out of parish rumors.’ Not only was that expected of the former priest, but he really didn’t want to hear it. It would do him no good to know whatever it was nobody really knew.

J.C. wiped his face with his lunch napkin. ‘You’d never make it in my business.’

‘True.’

‘That was some good barbecue, you should try it. But the fries came with aioli.’

‘So?’

‘I thought they weren’t servin’ anything people can’t pronounce.’

‘You just pronounced it. Maybe you and Mule can overlook the owner’s personality and we can settle in and be regulars.’

‘Or maybe we’ll go back to Lew Boyd’s an’ eat bad sandwiches . . .’

‘Your sandwiches were bad, not mine.’

‘. . . an’ sit on those dinette chairs by th’ vending machine, suckin’ up exhaust fumes from th’ garage . . .’

‘Snow blowing in . . .’

‘Freezin’ our ass to th’ chair,’ said J.C.

‘Those were the good old days.’

‘It was just a few months ago.’

‘
Tempus fugit
.’ He was going to coax his Latin back if it killed him.

‘Find a hole and fill it, that’s my motto. If I was a rich man, I’d put a real restaurant in this town.’

They were legging it up Main Street—a grand, soft day, as the Irish would say. He was glad he’d run this morning, if only a couple of miles; he’d get back to a regimen, he would straighten up and fly right.

‘We have a real restaurant,’ he said. ‘Lucera. Miss Sadie’s old place. Great food. Terrific atmosphere. Romantic.’

‘That’s the problem—you pay for romantic. I don’t need romantic.’

‘Adele might enjoy romantic, ever thought of that?’

‘Oh, boy, Dr. Phil comes to Mitford.’

‘Remember who helped you land Adele.’

‘Right. Mitford’s leading citizen.’

‘Who would that be?’

‘Wait’ll you see next week’s
Muse
. I paid big money for this piece.’

‘What piece?’

‘Wait an’ see. Inspired by the McGraw incident. You’ll like it.’

‘Come on. What are you talking about?’

‘Number one, we’re posing an important philosophical question to
this community. Number two, a couple of people called you Mitford’s leading citizen and we’re taking a survey—you could end up th’ winner.’

‘Wait a minute. I am not a leading citizen. No, no, that’s embarrassing. Are you serious?’

They stopped outside the men’s store.

‘For one thing, I don’t lead anybody.’

‘You led a hundred and twenty people, give or take, for sixteen years.’

‘That’s a completely different matter, and that was five years ago, it’s history.’ He didn’t like the feel of this. ‘You need to cancel that story,’ he said. The McGraw
incident
?

‘Freedom of the press, buddyroe.’ J.C. opened the door to the Collar Button, the bell jingled. ‘I’m droppin’ in here to pick up a half-page ad, looks like th’ local economy’s on the upswing.’

•   •   •

H
E
GUNNED
HIS
VINTAGE
RAGTOP
up the hill to Hope House, dismissing J.C.’s blather. He would give J.C. a call tomorrow, nip this thing in the bud—he didn’t like what he was feeling.

There. The kick in the engine, like a tic, then the feel of something disconnecting and firing again.

For a year or more, they had thrashed through whether to sell his Mustang, trade it, put it on blocks in the backyard (‘Too rural,’ said his wife), save it for Dooley, or auction it off at the fiftieth anniversary benefit for Children’s Hospital. Cynthia was keen on the benefit, Dooley didn’t appear to want it, and storing it on blocks, anywhere, seemed uselessly sentimental.

If he knew the ropes of Internet commerce, he would put it on eBay or one of those lists he’d heard about. Or maybe park it at Lew’s with a sign on the windshield.

The benefit was probably the answer. A completely trouble-free
way to let it go and get a deduction into the bargain. But he’d miss it, of course. Cynthia had given it to him a few years ago as a birthday present; it had marked a memorable chapter of his life.

He pulled into the parking lot at Hope House, liking the ease of the steering, the worn leather seat—an old shoe on wheels. He got out and locked it, then stood back and looked at what the boys in Holly Springs had called ‘a sharp little ride.’ A collar in a red Mustang convertible had raised a few eyebrows along the way, which, if nothing else, had been fun.

He heard the familiar buzz just beyond the treetops to the north, and looked up and, yes, oh, boy, there it was—Omer Cunningham’s yellow ragwing, making a pass over Hope House.

He threw up his arm and waved to beat the band. Omer dipped a wing and roared south.

Omer’s personalized wing dip was a tribute cherished by more than a few. Uncle Billy, a recipient of one of these dips, had marked the occasion by saying, ‘That’d bring tears to a glass eye.’

It gave him a thrill to see Omer gunning around in his slapdash contraption. Not that he, Timothy, had been the perfect passenger the time or two that Omer had taken him up. He remembered trying to hold on to his minimal breakfast; remembered looking down at the floorboard, where a ruined bath mat failed to cover a gaping hole—a hole through which he gained an uneasy view of treetops and power lines.

Where Omer got the wherewithal for such entertainment, he had no idea. ‘He’s a decorated ’Nam vet,’ J.C. said. ‘Let ’im do what he dern well pleases.’

The door to Room Number One was open, as he usually found it, and the real Number One was sleeping in her blue recliner.

The chair faced out to the nurses’ station where the action was, and had been called the best seat in the house or the worst, depending. All the world was right there, just through the door, still living
and using a walker, still dying and being rolled to the elevator on a gurney, still uttering the occasional epithet, still bringing flowers and removing the perished ones, still bearing trays of food, some you could eat and some you couldn’t, and once in a blue moon there came the brightness of children passing, going in to their great-grandma—or great-grandpa, though there were currently only three of these good souls, one still with an eye for the nurses.

The children were especially worth waiting for, hoping for, they seemed to come most often around Easter, bringing baskets, conducting something into the world of the hallway that reminded Louella of her own youth, those long days ago when she was raised by Miss Sadie, seven years her elder, and pulled around town in a red wagon like a sack of seed corn.

For Miss Sadie to raise a little dark girl as her own and to give her the family name if she wanted it, and then to take her in again years later, when her beautiful husband had died and her step-grandson was transferred to Los Angeles—to do all that and then put in her will that Louella Baxter Marshall was to have the many satisfactions of Room Number One until the day, according to the handwritten will, that ‘Louella, my sister in the Lord and dearest friend,’ was herself rolled to the elevator on a gurney.

‘Miss Louella, you see too much goin’ on,’ a nurse once said. ‘It’s too stimulatin’. You need rest.’

‘I’ll rest in th’ grave,’ was the reply.

Louella had asked him which cost the least, a casket funeral or cremation. Cremation, he said. She didn’t want the price of a fancy casket to bear on the funds Miss Sadie had set aside to take care of Louella Baxter Marshall’s needs. She wanted to choose cremation, then, as Miss Sadie had done. She had never heard of a Baptist being cremated, though Episcopalians did it all the time.

‘I was ’piscopal all my young days,’ she once told him. ‘Then
Baptist with my husband all my middle days, then ’piscopal all my old days. I guess I’ll go out th’ way I came in.’

‘Cynthia and I will keep your urn,’ he said, ‘or we can sprinkle your ashes.’

‘I’d hate bein’ closed up in that little thingamajig. Where would you sprinkle me?’

‘How about into the valley where the train runs every day blowing its horn, and the river turns its face to the sun and catches the reflection of clouds passing over?’

‘That sound good,’ she said, thoughtful. ‘I’m not afraid to go. You might get Dooley to sing.’

‘He’d be honored.’

‘No organ back of ’im, just ’is voice. An’ you could put a little pinch or two on that place where you buried Miss Sadie’s urn in th’ churchyard.’

Beloved
. He had written the word on a slip of paper and, unable to speak, handed it to the fellow who would engrave Sadie Baxter’s small headstone.

‘An’ a little pinch in th’ ol’ part of th’ buryin’ ground where some of my people are at.’

He took her hand and held it.

‘An’ you might maybe put a teaspoonful in th’ bushes up at Fernbank.’

He laughed. ‘I’ll be burning some fat on this run.’

‘In th’ lilacs. Th’ ones on th’ south side by th’ porch steps. Miss Sadie an’ me used to drag a little bench out there an’ peel apples in th’ sunshine.’

‘Consider it done,’ he had said. ‘But I believe we’ve got a while yet.’

He slipped into the room and sat by her chair on the low stool he always occupied during these visits. On the stool, he was twelve years old. Indeed, he felt some primordial consolation when he was with
Louella, something that reached back beyond his earthly beginning. Perhaps because it was Peggy’s dark-skinned arms in which he slept as an infant as his mother and father drove the Buick from Grandpa and Nanny Howard’s town house out to a new life in the Mississippi countryside. It had been Peggy he ran to when his heart was broken or his knee gashed when he fell on a rusty plowshare. It had been Peggy he always ran to, except when he turned ten, and suddenly there was no Peggy to run to.

He had a moment of yearning for those days. The ‘old fled days,’ the Irish called their years of tribulation. In tribulation, there had been a certain sweetness, too, as marrow in a remorseless bone.

Louella opened one eye, then the other. ‘I see you,’ she said, chuckling a little. ‘I see you on yo’ stool. Where you been so long?’ She pressed the remote on the chair arm and raised the recliner to an upright position.

He stood and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Been to Ireland,’ he said, happy.

Louella reached for her dentures on the TV table, installed them. ‘Where th’ fairies are!’

‘That’s it. Where have you been?’ He sat again on the stool.

‘Dreamin’ I was in that little wagon, bumpin’ all over town. I dream a lot ’bout that wagon, ’bout Miss Sadie pullin’ me around, darin’ somebody to call me that bad word we don’ use no more.’

I have a brother, he wanted to say, but couldn’t.

Then again, maybe he could. Maybe he should. As a kid, a dime had burned a hole in his pocket before he learned the secret promises of saving. This far greater secret, kept from all but Cynthia and Dooley and Lace, had burned a hole somewhere in him, and it was still smoking.

‘Can I tell you something . . . that no one else needs to know just now?’

‘’Tween us an’ th’ Lord.’

Louella would be ninety years old any day. What if she forgot her declaration and told a nurse, or . . . He felt the shame of his selfishly endless noodling.

‘I have a brother.’ There it went, like a string winding off a ball.

‘I declare.’

‘My father,’ he said.

‘Oh, yes.’

‘With the woman who helped raise me.’

‘Black like me,’ said Louella.

‘Yes.’

‘Happen all th’ time. When you find out?’

‘July, when I went down to Mississippi.’

‘They some bad jokes ’bout Miss’ippi.’

‘Don’t I know it.’

She looked at him with the inexplicable fondness that came from that other dimension.

‘I met him,’ he said.

‘He’s a good man?’

‘A very good man. Tall, handsome—like my father.’

‘He dark?’

‘Not very, but yes. He writes poetry.’

She nodded, affirming this in some way.

‘His mama livin’?’

‘She’s about your age. I saw her for the first time since I was a boy. Peggy is her name—she left when I was ten, it was a hard thing. No one knew why she left, though she thinks my mother knew.’

‘How old a man?’

‘Sixty. Retired from the railroad. He was a porter, and later a conductor on a train that ran from New Orleans to Chicago. The
City of New Orleans
, it’s called. He once got a hundred-dollar tip from Elvis Presley.’ He was oddly pleased with the Elvis scrap of Henry’s history.

‘A porter was a fine thing to be back then. A society of gentlemen, is what my gran’ma said.’

‘He didn’t have enough red blood cells, he would have died without a transfusion of cells, so I gave him some of mine.’ Tears sprang to his eyes; Holly Springs and all that came with it had been a time of tearing apart and putting back together, and then Ireland with its own riving and mending, and now home to try and find his center again.

‘He gon’ make it?’