The Marble Orchard (28 page)

The room smelled of rotten wood beams. Gray light crept down from a small window cobbed with spider webs. He made out the support posts and rafter joists and then the plumbing snaking overhead in rusted curls, the piping coated with verdigris. A corner shelf held jars of brinish green peas. Underneath the shelf slouched a recliner. There were other things. A push mower, gear sprockets hung on nails, damp cardboard boxes, shadows viscous and oily on the smooth concrete floor.

The cellar, he thought. She put me in the cellar.

Beam rolled onto his side and the mattress squeaked under him. He didn’t know how long he’d slept, or even if sleep had come at all, though the bitter fuzz on his tongue seemed to suggest it had.

He sat up with some effort, the blankets falling from him. When he stood, his head felt like a weight tied to his neck. The bare concrete floor chilled his feet, and he shivered until he found his boots and slid them on. He walked slowly to the steps, rising up them carefully and quietly. When he entered the kitchen, his mother appeared startled and afraid at first, jerking back from the table, the chair legs grating on the linoleum, but after a moment she thumped her cigarette into the ashtray.

“Hungry?” she asked.

“I am, but I don’t feel like eating right now.” Beam crossed the floor and sat down, the bright kitchen bulbs making him squint.

Derna rose from the table and ran a glass for him at the faucet. She handed it to him and he drank it down slow, feeling the water’s chill run the length of him, and then he held the glass against his chest and sat looking at his mother.

“I thought the worst,” she said, sitting down beside him.

“Why’d you put me in the cellar?” he asked.

Derna tugged on her cigarette. “You walked there,” she said.

“I did what?”

“You fell asleep on the landing but then came around enough to walk and where you went to was the cellar.” She waved to the open door that showed the beginning descent of the wooden stairs.

Beam set the water glass on the table. “There’s people after me,” he said.

Derna stood up. Moving away from the table, she went to the sink and gazed out the window, keeping her back to him. She stubbed her cigarette out in the basin. “You know who it is already,” she said.

“I want you to say it. And I want you tell me why.”

Derna kept her back to him, and after a spell, he heard the soft patter of her breath.

“Do you even know your ownself what this is all about?” Beam asked.

A dish towel lay on the counter and she began daubing at the Formica top with it, smudging the coffee and jelly stains into bright smears. “I know Clem had to send you away.”

Beam watched her hand circle over the counter. “You know that I killed somebody out on the river, then?”

The towel stopped. Derna’s back stiffened and she drew a long breath and held it a time and then exhaled. “I know that’s what happened,” she said.

“I’m telling what happened, all right. For the first time, I’m saying it myself. What I did, it figures that people would be after me.” Beam leaned forward in his chair. “But it should be the law looking for me. Not Presto Geary. Not Loat Duncan.”

Derna turned to him, her eyes startled and sharp. “Why would Loat be after you?” she said. “Did he do you wrong? That’s not what I asked him to do.”

“Asked him to do?”

Derna’s eyes turned far off, starry and dazed. She took her pack of Camels from the counter and lit a cigarette, the smoke
lifting above her like a curtain, the gray drape of it lingering in the spacey kitchen light. “I shouldn’t be surprised,” she said faintly. “Why did I think it would be any other way?”

Beam lifted himself from the chair and crossed the floor to stand before her. He gripped her by the arms. “Mama,” he said, “what are you talking about? You’re not making any sense.”

Derna shook her head. “None of this makes sense.” She drew away from him and he let her go, her dress sighing as she rubbed her hips against the edge of the countertop. “I’ve tried to live right most of my days. But there’s this world. It gets you so trapped and caught sometimes it feels like the things you do ain’t really you. They’re what somebody else would do.” She threw her cigarette into the sink and ran water over it.

“Where’s Daddy?” Beam asked.

She looked at him and then lifted the dishtowel from the counter, dried her hands, then dropped the cloth in the sink. “He’s gone off.”

“Gone off?”

“He’s not here,” she said.

“Where’s he at then?”

“I don’t know.”

“What the hell is going on?” Beam demanded. “Start telling me all of it.”

“I can’t tell you anymore than you already know.”

Beam raked his fingers along his cheeks and groaned. “Did you ever think what it might be like, killing somebody?” he said. “Think what that might mean for me? Knowing what I’d done caused some other poor bastard to not be around no more? How you reckon that is to think about all alone in the night somewhere?”

She turned to the window again, but he reached out and jerked her around and looked down into the pan of her face, the sun-cured cheeks hard and freckled, her glazed eyes like bobs of glass. “Think about that,” he spat.

“I have,” she said. “But what good does it do, one knowing this and the other knowing something else? The things you want told won’t make nothing easy. Not you hearing them or me saying them. So why not leave them still?”

He let go of her arms. “I can’t leave them still,” he said. “Tell me why Loat Duncan is after me. Tell me what I did out on that river.”

“It weren’t you,” she whispered. “It never could be you.”

“The hell it weren’t me,” Beam said. “If it weren’t me then who was it?”

“Not me,” she said. “Not my boys. Never my boys. Somebody else, but not my boys.”

Beam felt drowsy and he seemed to drift in the want of sleep. “You’re crazy,” he said, his speech a bit slurred. “I don’t know what you mean saying ‘boys’. It’s just me. It’s always been just me.”

Derna put her hands on the table, her palms turned up as if waiting to catch some long expected gift. “Beam, you were my favorite. You got to know that. The other one, the one they found, I didn’t even barely know him. I throwed him away. But I knew all along I’d throw my first one away. It was like something I couldn’t help, like it was simple as taking air. I knew it, so my heart didn’t break. But then you had to get took away too and that was more than I could stand. It was like somebody had just sucked my spirit dry. Because you were my favorite. Always. I’d put my hand on you and it’d feel no different than if I was touching my own skin. So when you left, I was just a ghost. I was somebody not even really there no more.” She took hold of his hands. “You got to know it, Beam,” she said. “I never did want anything like this to happen to you. That’s why I never told you about Paul. I didn’t want you to turn out anything like him.”

Beam pulled his hands away from her. “Who’s Paul?” he asked.

“Paul’s the other one,” Derna said. “The one I had before you. The one you killed out on the ferry.” She kept her eyes on the
floor as her lashes glistened with tears. “We never did tell you you had a brother.”

Beam remembered the night on the ferry, and the way the stranger he’d killed had muttered Loat’s name. The swell of memory then rose to bear him back through the tumult of years to when he and his mother would drive into town to Wal-Mart to meet a man with a wide-brimmed straw hat and a thin drop of a nose, his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows, his chin blackened by whiskers, a strange figment halting there in the aisle among the canned tomatoes and Ragu. Beam recollected the man’s eyes, dark in his skull as they’d watched him.

You keep good company,
he had said to Beam, winking.
But what about you, your own self?

Me?

Yeah. You. Are you good company?

The man’s laughter, like the cawing of crows.

Loat
, his mother said.
We need to get on
.

So that was it, then. A name. So now it was said and the world would have it.

“I lived a way in my younger days that weren’t nothing but wrong,” Derna began. “I don’t make no excuse for it. It was a way I come to live in the world and it don’t hardly even seem like me when I look back on it now. But I had Loat and that seemed like all the everything I would ever need. And then I had Paul and it was all too much.”

She seemed brittle now, browned and dried like some flower left pressed in a Bible. A revenant of an age now become only crumbling dust.

“I had to leave then. I had to go and Clem was the one to take me.” She paused and lifted her wet eyes to look at Beam. “But I was already in the family way with you. And I knew you were another son. Another one that belonged to Loat.”

Beam stepped away from her. All the Sheetmires had watered away and were gone now. Only a blank haze stood before him,
as if all of his past were but a milky dream. He felt the sleep returning, his head gone sluggish and drunk, and as he backed slowly out of the kitchen, his mother receding before him, the murmur of deep waters filled his head, the long echo and purl of the river gliding over him. He turned as if to go out into whatever world remained for him, but the sound of the waters grew and he fell suddenly, as though drowning weights had been fastened to his legs, and a great flume of sleep bore him on into a yet thicker dark.

When he came to, he was on the sofa in the living room. The television droned and cast a green lathered light over the knitted afghan that covered his legs. A single lamp burned in a corner.

Derna was spraying Pledge over a pair of wooden bookends and scrubbing them with a cloth. She sat in a recliner beside his head and the bright lemony smell of furniture polish burned in his nose.

“You still got the sleeping sickness,” she said when she saw that he was awake.

“Did you think maybe I’d found a cure out there in the woods?” he asked groggily.

Derna’s hands worked at the bookends, her face marooned behind her hair. “No, I never thought no such thing. I was just talking.”

Beam sat up and gazed at the floor, trying to draw the fatigue out. His neck was stiff, and his legs seemed jellied and worthless, and the weight of all his mother had told him perched on his shoulders so that he felt he could never rise from this place, but would remain in timeless supplication to the burden of knowing it and of having heard it spoken.

“I need to make a phone call,” he said.

“Who you calling?”

“The sheriff. I’m going to turn myself in.”

Derna sighed and stopped polishing the bookends. She
placed them on the carpet at her feet and looked at the window, the curtains standing like shrouded watchers at a tomb. “What I know is that you ain’t the only one to blame for all this,” she said. She wadded the polishing cloth in her hand, her fingers trembling. “I know that what is happening now is all part of a price for how we’ve lived. All of us. Me, I never was much good for being a mother, so I can’t tell you what you should do. But I don’t hate you for killing Paul because we had a hand in that, too. Me and Clem. I don’t even hate Loat like I used to. Looking at you and knowing what we’ve all done together, I’m all chilled and clean with cold inside.” She put her hand out and Beam took it. Her fingers were stiff and heavy against his own, icy to the touch. “You go on. Go on wherever is best and if you want to, in later years, you come see me.” Then she left the room, coursing down the hallway in her pale green gown with the hem trailing behind.

Beam drew the afghan away and rose from the sofa and went to the kitchen where he dialed the sheriff. He then returned to the living room and waited until he heard the grind of tires on the gravel outside and saw the flash of headlights through the drapes, the light falling through the threadbare fabric like the light of morning on the river.

XXIV

Other than a few terse commands grunted at Beam, Elvis and Filback didn’t speak at all, showing little shock at the sight of this boy who had been the cause of so much trouble. They simply placed a pair of handcuffs on his wrists and then stowed him in the back of the cruiser as calmly as if they were loading groceries. Then they turned the cruiser around in the dry yard of the house and made the highway, heading back toward town which, this far out, was only a hazy fume of lights above the line of dark trees on the distant horizon.

They were perhaps three miles past the house when they met the Peterbilt on a corn-trimmed stretch of road. The rig sat idling in the oncoming lane. The blinding glare of its high beams struck them flush in the face.

“The fuck is this?” said Filback.

Elvis hit the cruiser bulbs and coasted to within twenty yards of the Peterbilt, the blue lights cycling over the truck and the road and the corn in plasmatic scatters.

“Think he’s drunk?” said Filback.

“Or lost,” Elvis added. He glanced into the backseat. Beam’s eyes were wild in the thrust of the truck lights.

“Y’all sit tight,” Elvis said. He took his hat off the center console and tucked it firmly onto his head, then picked up the cruiser’s bullhorn and exited the car. The cool of the night licked his hands. He put the cruiser’s spotlight on the rig and addressed the driver with the bullhorn.