The Lost Saints of Tennessee (16 page)

“Lilly.” He breathed a thousand questions into the word. “Our boy will die in there. You know that. He's barely held on in the regular hospital.”

I brushed my cheeks with the back of my hand. “We can go see him every week. They'll take care of him. Don't you understand? They'll do better than me. I can't. He'll be okay, Carter. He'll be okay.”

The house had gone dark. Only the light from the kitchen could be seen, slicing the space between us. My husband looked at me for the longest time before dropping his face in his hands. I couldn't tell if he was crying or praying or both.

The burned stench of the forgotten corn bread filtered into the living room, replacing the warm smells of our bodies. He raised his eyes to mine.

“We'll do what you want for a little while. You just need a rest, Lillian. That's all. You're tired.”

He opened the circle of his arms, and I stepped in, not realizing that nothing would ever be the same again.

Twenty-Seven

Last week I quit playing dumb at the old folk's home. The game wasn't fun anymore and it was too hard pretending in front of my daughters. And I wanted to go home. But instead of letting me go, the doctors just moved me over to Tolliver Hospital. The surgery is tomorrow. Dr. Trent started to tell me about the operation this morning—
So, Mrs. Cooper, we'll begin with an incision along the rib—
I told him to shut the hell up. Why does the man think I would want to know what he's going to cut on me? Really. Men are just stupid sometimes. But not as dumb as women can be. I made a list today, nothing else to do, on the back of my breakfast napkin. “Lillian's Life Lessons,” that's what I'll call it:

1. You can be pretty until the cows come home but it doesn't get you a life you want.
   
2. (which is related to 1.) Eventually everybody gets old, and being pretty, no matter how much Mary Kay you put on, is not an option anymore.
   
3. Your children will suck the life out of your bones and then be mad at you for not baking their favorite chocolate cake for their tenth birthday (Daisy is still mad at me over this one).
   
4. For women, our children are all we've got and if we
   screw them up, it's all over.
   
5. (which is related to 4.) Once a woman falls in love, she can't get anything done after that.
   

That's it. Nothing earth-shattering, I guess. But can I
tell you how much I messed up? The whole damned thing, I think. Maybe if I'd been able to keep my knees tight against the persistent pressing of one Carter Cooper, I'd be in Manhattan right now. Living in my penthouse apartment with my younger live-in lover, managing quite nicely on my occasional guest appearance in a Broadway show—
Come and hear the legendary voice of Lillian Grace Parker in a limited engagement.

At night over at the Preserve, when all the crazy people were sleeping their hazy-dazy dreams, I would think about my boys, Ezekiel and Carter, and my girls—Violet, Daisy, and Rosie. If New York had worked out, what about them? Those children wouldn't have walked the earth. And while some, namely my own children, might think I'd get up and do a dance about that, I wouldn't. Not hardly.

Carter was the hardest for me. Would have been for any mother. I wanted my kids to get more from life than I had been able to grab. And because of that rubeola, Carter wasn't ever going to get two miles past Clayton. Not two miles. Just like me. Just
like
me.

I tried to make Ezekiel understand why I put Carter in the state hospital all those years ago. But he wouldn't listen, thought I was some kind of monster for putting his brother away.
Throwing
Carter away, that's what Ezekiel said. That's what it looked like. I know. I didn't want to throw Carter away. Forget, maybe. For just a little while. Until I got some rest. Until Carter got better.

The boy I thought I wanted to lose was never lost to
me.
His brother, on the other hand, never came back. Ezekiel
hasn't hugged me the same since he came home from Virginia. When
he puts his arms around me, he doesn't pull me close. He just
holds me out so I can barely catch the scent of warmth and little boy that was like air to me.

Part of me hoped that if Zeke found a way to forgive himself for not saving his brother from drowning, maybe he could figure out how to forgive me. I know he blames himself for Carter's death. When the police investigated the drowning, they asked me if I had any reason to think Ezekiel would want to cause Carter harm. None, I said. Those boys loved each other the way most families can only hope for. No, it was a terrible accident. Nobody knows what happened.

After Carter moved in with Zeke, he brought me wildflowers every day until the day he died. If I wasn't home, he'd leave a note:
Where are you? Here's the flowers. Love, your son.

I'm ready to see Carter again. It's not going to be long now. And when we meet up, I'm going to love that boy to pieces.

PART III

EZEKIEL

I will seek that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away, and will bind up that which was broken . . .

Ezekiel 34:16

Twenty-Eight

1985

The day after the tornado, the phone rings nonstop. And every time it's answered, a Cooper woman is on the end of the line worrying about me getting blown to bits. My sisters call, one after the other. The phone hardly rests in the cradle before jangling again. Osborne emerges from his room to grab coffee in the kitchen. He wears a large, brown bathrobe and navy socks with frayed holes at the heel. We manage to say hello before being interrupted. He looks at me, then looks at the phone. All I can do is shrug. But I will not pick it up. With a snort, Osborne crosses to the phone and answers it. He holds it out to me.

“Your ex-wife.”

Technically, Jackie doesn't qualify as a Cooper but she still acts like one.

“Are you okay? Are the Laceys okay? I put the TV on this morning and there was Bailey, front and center. ‘Killer tornado,' they said. God, Zeke.”

Louisa gets on the phone next, telling me she has been praying all morning I'd be okay. “Come home, Dad. Please.”

Honora refuses to speak to me directly, choosing instead to shout in the background. “Way to pick a place to go, Dad.
Nice
choice.”

Jackie gets back on and says pretty much the same thing. When she lowers her voice so the girls can't hear, I brace myself.

“You need to know that your daughter is getting very serious with this guy, Zeke. This senior guy. I just wanted her to go to homecoming with him, but now they're studying together every day after school and going to the movies on Fridays.”

Our daughter has sworn up, down, and sideways that boys are “the stupidest dorks on the planet” and she will have nothing to do with them. And though I'm no fan of her weekly hair-
dye jobs, they serve the purpose of making her look “weird,”
something I know most Mabry teenage boys are not interested in exploring.

“Who is this boy? Does he play sports?”

“He plays drums in the school marching band.”

“Are you kidding? You're letting her go out with a musician? Is she smoking and drinking now, too? Goddamn it, Jacklynn. Just tell her no.”

Curtis bellows in the background that they are going to be late for dinner at his parents' house. Jackie lowers her voice again.

“I'm not going to tell her no. She'll just do it anyway behind my back. At least I know where she is. She needs a father right now. You picked a bad time to have a midlife crisis, you asshole.”

When the word
asshole
enters the conversation, there is nowhere to go but down, so I get off the phone, though not before promising to come back soon. I
know
Honora needs me. But I can't go back. Not yet.

Mother makes it through next. She is worried sick and wants me to come home. Calls me crazy for preferring to stay in a state where entire cows get lifted off their hooves and thrown onto a different farm. Her voice sounds weak and I ask if she is all right.

“Nothing a little death couldn't fix,” she says.

It is another moment when I should say something about the lung cancer. But two decades worth of not caring, or attempting not to care, get in the way.

“It's a mess here, Mother. I should go.”

Being outside, away from the pull of BellSouth, feels like the only safe place, tornado or no tornado. I find a pair of work gloves in the barn and start dragging piles of branches. There are so many of them, spread over every inch of the property, it will take months to clear it all. The tornado did $250 million worth of damage over three counties and killed two people in a neighboring town. Cousin Georgia wants to replant the apple orchard, but Osborne refuses to talk about it beyond saying,
Don't be stupid, Georgia, it's gone—one hundred years and a wind took it all away.

The roar of a chain saw interrupts the meadowlark's morning song and the chatter from the radio in the barn, where
talk of the tornado has been replaced by breaking news of the passengers' release from the hijacked Italian cruise ship
Achille Lauro
. Georgia and Osborne's handyman/­groundskeeper/farming expert, Jimmy Trotter, calls me over to help him cut a large branch from a downed tree.

Jimmy and his family live in a small house on the eastern edge of the property. Georgia says he saved the orchard several years ago when fire blight threatened to destroy the trees.

It takes the two of us to drag the cut branch to the pile. I ask if he thinks the orchard should be replanted.

“Who knows? This is good growing ground. Maybe not apples.”

When Jimmy leans over the chain saw and it jumps to life again, I motion for him to wait.

“What, Mr. Cooper? I need to work.”

The jarring loudness of the saw requires me to yell my question twice.

“Miss Chambers?” he says. “She's the best riding teacher around here.”

“She's giving me a lesson later this week. Says she'll have me riding by the end of it.”

“Miss Chambers doesn't fool around. You'll see.”

Elle had called earlier and said she'd be happy to give me a lesson. It would provide a welcome break from clearing branches on her farm. Best riding teacher around, is she? Probably never taught a forty-two-year-old out-of-shape guy before.

When Friday finally arrives, I take longer than usual with showering and dressing. A dusty, half-empty bottle of Old Spice sits on the dresser in my room. It smells close to how it should, so I slap some on my face and neck before heading up to the stables with a cup of coffee. “Peanut Farmers Get the Shell Out” is written on the mug.

Getting acquainted with the horses before Elle shows up seems like a good idea. They hear me coming and neigh in a friendly way. I fill each of their feed buckets and hang them over the stalls. After reassuring myself that the horses are too busy eating to be worried about me, I grab the shovel off the wall and set to work. Darcy throws me a backward glance when I get to hers. I tell her she can either leave me alone or step in crap the rest of the day, and after stamping her back foot once, she returns to breakfast.

By the time Diamond's stall is cleaned out, patches of sweat have formed under my arms. I take off my heavy flannel shirt and work in my undershirt. Whitey finishes her oats first and keeps looking over at me, so I stand by the stall and scratch behind her long, hairy ears. Darcy finishes next and begins nickering at me, too. Which one will Elle suggest I ride? Diamond looks like the safest bet. He's much bigger than Darcy and Whitey and possesses a reassuring calmness. I pat him on the forelock and bribe him with the promise of fresh apples tomorrow if he makes me look like Travolta in
Urban Cowboy
.

“Diamond's everybody's favorite.”

The voice comes from the stable doors. Elle stands between them. Her legs are encased in tight riding pants, knee-high boots hug the roundness of her calves, and she wears a long-sleeved shirt with “Chambers Riding School” in faded letters on it. I begin not to care if I fall off.

“Good morning,” I say.

“Don't bet on it.”

“Trying to scare me?”

“No,” she says, laughing, then adds, “well, maybe a little.”

Elle looks me up and down, stopping at my feet. “No cowboy boots?”

“Nope.” Never owned a pair of them. The old, brown lace-up work boots are the closest thing I have.

“You're not wearing them,” I point out.

“That's because I teach English riding, not Western.”

I wonder if this means we'll have tea instead of a beer after the lesson. She disappears into the tack room. All three of the horses hang their heads over the stalls, nostrils flaring. Darcy keeps tossing her head. Whitey watches me out of the corner of her eye. Diamond's ears prick up and he does a little dance back and forth in his stall.

Elle explains each step as she tacks him up—how to insert the bit gently into his mouth, to always remember to put a blanket beneath the saddle to prevent its chafing the horse's skin, how to cinch the saddle properly so you won't fall off. She pulls a few sugar cubes from her pocket.

“And this is the final piece. Give them a treat before and after you ride and then they'll love to see you walk in the door.”

There is a soft, lilting quality to her voice that suggests the South but isn't deep enough to make me believe she grew up here.

“Where are you from?”

She rolls her eyes. “People ask me that all the time. I think you Southern folks are obsessed with accents. It's like you want to tell the exact county a person is from by the way they talk.”

She's right.

“The drawl, if you can call it that, is from living here for almost five years and going to college out here. I'm from California originally.”

California transplants are a scarce breed in the South. Most of the visiting Californians I've run into talk about how quaint the South is and how slow the pace, but you can tell they'd go crazy with all this slowness if they lived here.

“What made you stay out here?”

She shakes a finger. “Quit stalling. We're getting you up on this horse. And the answer to your question is I fell in love with this part of the world when I went to college at UVA, and even a nasty divorce from a Virginia gentleman couldn't keep me from settling down here. No place like it, really. ”

“I went to UVA, too.”

“What year? I graduated in seventy-four.”

I turn away from her and pat Diamond's neck. The tendons are pronounced and thick. “I was there a little before your time.”

If I say more, she'll know what an old geezer I am and that I never graduated. “How long have you been divorced?”

“We are curious this morning, aren't we?” she says,
leading Diamond out of the stables.

“I'm divorced, too. It's been about two years. Since it was legal. We were separated for a few years before that. My ex-wife remarried last month.”

I tell myself to shut up; she doesn't want to know any of this.

Elle stops next to a tree stump. “Let's focus on the horse now, okay? Hop up on the stump.”

“How come?”

“Trust me, okay?”

We face each other and our eyes meet. Today hers are the color of slick river rocks, darker than I recall. In them I glimpse guardedness. The confidence falls away for a moment and I see her, really see her, for the first time. She has been hurt. Deeply, I suspect.

“Are you ready or not?” The tone is all business again.

The saddle is a tiny scrap of leather that looks big enough for a small child, not a grown man. There is no saddle horn. When I mention this fact Elle nods.

“That's right. English saddles don't have horns. Sorry.”

She looks far from sorry. As I climb on top of the stump, getting a leg over the saddle without having anything to grab becomes a big problem. Mounting a horse consists of two ­
motions—putting the foot nearest the horse into the stirrup
and then, in one fluid motion, hiking the other leg up and over the horse. She notices my scowl.

“Mounting is the hardest part of learning to ride ­English-style. Don't worry. We won't get it down perfectly today. We just need to get you up there. Ready?”

“No, but I don't think that's going to stop you.”

“Give it a go, old boy.”

She stands next to me and places my hands in the right spots on the saddle. I can feel the rough calluses on the plump underside of her fingers against mine. Elle taps my left leg and motions for it to go in the stirrup. After almost losing my balance twice, I manage it.

“Now, on the count of three, I want you to push off with that back leg and swing it with everything you've got over to the other side of Diamond. Got it?”

I glance at the horse, who is busy nibbling at a fly on his chest.

“He's not going anywhere. Diamond would wait pa
tiently for a week for you to get on him.”

I mutter a curse before attempting to throw my leg over. Somehow it gets stuck halfway and my body begins sliding in the opposite direction. Elle quickly shores me up, allowing the leg to make it around Diamond's ample side. It takes a minute to situate my feet properly in the stirrups.

The ground looks far away and I grip my legs tighter. The high vantage point offers a view of the farm all the way to the towering sycamore grove to the east, untouched by the storm, and the symmetrical lines of the peach orchard to the west. Diamond stands stock-still like the champion he is. I feel no need to set the horse in motion.

“You did it!” Elle claps. I grin.

“Now, I want you to hold the reins lightly, don't exert any pressure, while I lead him into the ring.”

“I'm pretty happy just sitting up here. No need to do
anything else.”

“Don't be a wuss.”

The rest of the lesson passes without catastrophe. Diamond pretends to let me tell him what to do. Toward the end, Elle asks if I want to take it up to a trot. When “trot” is defined as going faster, I shake my head.

“I agree,” she says. “We've got to have something for
you to look forward to.”

Walking suits me fine. I have never been one of those guys who are hooked on speed. The world turns too fast as it is without me trying to keep up.

After taking off Diamond's saddle, blanket, and bridle,
we let him loose in the ring. Elle suggests letting Darcy and
Whitey out to join him for a little exercise. As I lead Darcy out to the ring, she nicks me on the shoulder, not hard enough to break the skin but with enough force to make me jump.

“She's mad at you. She's jealous because you rode Diamond instead of her. Got to look out for that one.”

“So I hear.”

We lean against the ring's wooden railing and watch.
Darcy and Diamond chase each other while Whitey stands in the middle, his tail flicking every so often to ward off a fly. The sun has burned off the morning mist. Next to me, Elle lets her head fall back, closing her eyes.