The Reservoir (11 page)

She came to Tommie first with the news. He was out in the garden picking a few ears of corn for their supper, disappointed with the number of worms he was finding. They’d had too much rain lately. “How about this one?” he said, handing her an especially mealy ear containing two fat green worms. He pretended not to watch her peel back the shucks.

She made a noise of disgust and dropped the ear. “You ought to be ashamed, Tommie,” she said.

“Willie thinks it’s because Aunt Jane makes him coat the seeds in tar,” he said, “so the birds can’t get them.” He took a bite from a clean ear and offered it to her.

“I’ve decided I’m going to move in with Grandpa John.” She looked up at him with such expectant eyes that he wanted to kiss her forehead as though she were a child. But she had recently told him she did not want to kiss him anymore, that she just couldn’t, and after a while he’d quit trying. “They need somebody to help do for them,” she said, “and I’ll be close enough to home to tutor my little sisters. I’ve missed them.”

“Have you told Aunt Jane and Willie?” Tommie asked.

“I wanted to tell you first,” she said. Again she waited. “To see if you would care.”

And then he understood, and yet he could not help being cruel. She missed the attention he had given her, her attachment to him growing in proportion to his very lack of attention. “Of course I care,” he said. “You’re like a sister to me. I’ll miss you. But you’ll visit, won’t you?” He felt warm with pity and a kind of perverse power, and he wanted to fold her in his arms like a dog he had just kicked.

“Don’t you want to know why I’m leaving?”

“You just said your grandfather needed somebody to take care of him.”

She bit her lower lip and looked at him, blinking as if she were about to cry. “Willie and me are never going to get married, don’t you understand that? Don’t you talk to him, Tommie?”

“Not about you,” he said. “He doesn’t talk about you.” He hadn’t spoken much with Willie all summer—Willie had been away a lot, his work taking him to the far reaches of the county, and when he was home he seemed too tired and distracted for much conversation.

“I don’t want to marry him,” she said. She gave him a pleading look, holding her arms tight across her chest. Then she darted through the row of corn and disappeared. He stepped through the two rows that formed the edge of the garden and looked up and down the lane separating the garden from the cornfield. Then he saw the stalks moving, their high tassels clattering like paper bells. He dashed forward, calling, “Lillie!” The stalks shivered and he went plunging into a welter of greenness, the stalks and leaves and ripe ears smacking his face and arms. Then he was actually running, through tall corn, dodging this way and that, as if they were in a maddening dream of chasing, or being chased—he could feel Lillie’s exhilaration and it urged him on.

He stopped and called for her again. It was quiet. There was a rustling off to his left. “Lillie?” He heard her sniffle, and as slowly as he could he came through the stalks and found her crying quietly. The sky was an almost golden blue at the end of the day, light filtering through the yellow tassels and the pale green shoots. They were out in the middle of the cornfield and he had the feeling they were alone in a vast sea at the beginning of some momentous occurrence. The pollen dust made him sneeze, and she giggled, then sniffed again. “What are you doing?” he said. She gave him a furtive glance, then bolted down an alley. He stood rooted to the ground watching her. She stopped about ten yards away, nearly hidden by the dark jade of the lower leaves like a mythical creature in a jungle. Then with one side step she melted into the next alley. He moved in an identical fashion, carefully, lest a wrong motion scare her off. Again, they regarded each other at opposite ends of a dark green hall. He tried waving. But now she backed up, inventing new rules for her little game, until she was so far down the alley he could not make out her face at all. He started slowly forward, and she turned and ran.

A breeze was up, rattling the stalks, and the air felt suddenly heavier and cooler the way it will before a summer rain. He chased Lillie until he began heaving for breath, then stopped and leaned over, letting the spots clear from his vision. When he got free of the stalks he saw her running toward a vine-covered tumbledown slave cabin between the oatfield and the woods. She glanced back, then slowed to a walk. The wind made her pink skirt wrap around her legs. The light in the west was fading rapidly from plum to liver to black as storm clouds began chasing the blue sky.

He found her sitting on the caved-in step, hands folded in her skirts. The upper corner of the open door frame at her back held a mud daubers’ clay organ-pipe nest. Inside the dark cabin, slats of light fell through chinks in the pine-shingled roof to the dirt floor. He sat beside her on the coarse-grained wood. “You don’t have to marry Willie,” he said.

“Do you still love me, Tommie?” she asked.

He could smell her perspiration and some heavy musk that seemed strange coming from one so small that he could pick her up and carry her home. “Yes,” he said, “I’ll always love you. You rebuffed me, and you were right to. I’m sorry I confused you.” A low rumble of thunder sounded in the distance.

“I kept waiting for you to come to me again, but you’ve paid me no attention all summer. Willie’s a good, kind, strong man, but he’s not funny and strange like you. He wouldn’t dream of standing on the roof and giving a speech to the chickens. That was the funniest thing I ever saw in my life.”

“Aunt Jane didn’t think so,” Tommie told her, not pleased that he’d made such a lasting impression when he’d thought no one had been watching.

“I could never be happy married to him, knowing that I’d turned you down. He keeps all his tools lined up in perfect order. And he talks nicely to the horses when he harnesses them. I’d trust him with my life. But—” She stopped.

“I’d trust him too,” he said.

“He once saved me from a skeleton,” Lillie replied. “We were out walking in the swamp and I almost stepped in it. It was a Yankee soldier, with no head. ‘How do you think it got that a-way?’ I asked him. And he said, ‘Somebody must’ve cut it off.’ He says funny things like that without knowing they’re funny.”

“But why then—”

“I don’t know, Tommie. Quit asking me. I’m sitting here with you. Are you trying to make me feel guilty? He was too good for me. Now are you satisfied?”

“And I’m not as good?”

“I thought you were the more serious one, but after a while I saw that wasn’t so.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s something in you that’s not in him. You’re neat in the way you dress, but you shade your eyes with your hat.”

“What are you talking about?” He pushed his hat up. “Everybody shades their eyes with their hat.”

“You’re very pious and moral, but I know there’s a naughty streak in you a mile wide. I saw that book of dirty poems in your room.”

Sid Aylett had given him a copy of
Wisdom for Girls
, a popular book with college boys. “You had no right to go snooping in my room,” he told her.

“I wasn’t snooping, I was looking for a pencil for Aunt Jane.”

He sat back. Rain began to patter on the delicate new leaves all around, then stopped. “What about Nola?” he asked her.

“If it’s me you love, you shouldn’t marry her, Tommie. That’s not right. You know it isn’t.”

He stood and looked out over the tree line to the west. It was suddenly calm, but there was lightning far away, then faint thunder. Up in the pasture the cows that had gathered under one of their favorite shade trees began moving off toward the barn. “I shouldn’t have interfered,” he said. “That’s what wasn’t right.”

Now the top leaves in the shade tree, a huge gnarled silver maple, began fluttering. He saw Willie opening the pasture fence to let the cows into the paddock.

“Nola told me she wouldn’t marry you if you were the Duke of York.”

“Did she?” he said, watching how the tree was beginning to rock in the wind. “She only said that to test you. What did you say?”

“I told her I wouldn’t either. I wouldn’t marry you for all the tea in Texas.” Lillie laughed, spreading her arms out to feel the breeze.

“That must be a lot,” he said, laughing with her, envying her simplicity.

Lillie stood, just as a big gust came and whipped the branches of the maple. Thunder cracked much closer now, rumbling in waves all around. “I expect we’d better go,” she said.

They started walking toward the house as the rain came. It began pouring all at once. They turned back to the little cabin to wait it out, taking up positions just inside the doorway. Then it commenced to spray across the roof and seep through the cracks. Soon it was running down veins in the plaster walls, exposing more horsehair, and spattering on the hard clay floor. Willie was shouting for them, so Tommie called out to him and waved. He had to jump up and down to be seen. Instead of turning back to the house, though, Willie was running toward them. “We’re fine!” Tommie yelled. “Go back.”

But he kept coming on. He ran across the pasture, slipping just as he got to the big tree. He picked himself up and ran for the fence and hurdled it with two hands. A shrieking boom came out of the air. The tree limbs seemed to open up, and a brilliant orange stake of electricity leaped from the tree to a jagged bolt out of the clouds. Willie went down, and the air exploded. Tommie began running to him. The entire top half of the tree was lying on the ground beside the trunk.

Willie was on all fours looking back at what had been the shade tree. “You fool,” Tommie said. They were halfway between the house and the cabin.

“Lillie,” Willie said. The rain and thunder were merciless. He got up and ran down the edge of the oatfield. Tommie chased after him. When they got there they were both wet to the skin. Lillie, huddling in the leaky cabin, wasn’t much drier. “Are you all right?” Willie said, looking from Lillie to Tommie.

“Of course we are!” Tommie shouted over the drumming rain.

He gave Tommie another look, as if he was disappointed. Then he began walking back to the house, head down. Tommie went out and stood in front of him. “What are you doing?” he said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Willie said.

“Then at least run, so you don’t get hit.”

“I’m not worried.” He tried to push past his brother.

“Willie, I’m not stealing your girl.”

“It’s all right,” he said, moving out of Tommie’s way. Tommie could have gotten in front of him again, but he knew Willie would have just pushed him or hit him.

Lillie came out and stood beside Tommie in the pouring rain. “Go on up to him,” he told her. “Go!” He put a hand on her wet blouse, wanting to hold her and push her both. “Fine then,” he said, “I’ll go.” He hurried along, turning back only once and seeing her trudging along, holding her arms tight to herself, the sky an enormous silver-gray expanse around her. He caught up with his brother and they walked quietly along together. At one point Willie looked back and, apparently satisfied, kept going, head down. The rain was already slackening by the time they got to the tree. They paused to look at it, then continued on toward the paddock. Tommie was starting to get a chill, but he took his time coming in, letting Willie go ahead.

The tree was a slain giant, its leaves still a vivid green. In the exposed core a jagged upthrust of bright wood was charred where the lightning had struck. To the west the sky had already cleared, while in the east it was dark, and a fountain of color curved down from the clouds to the trees. He watched it as he walked back in the misting rain, wondering if it would fade or get brighter. By the time he got to the back porch, it had become luminous, full of the most brilliant color he had ever seen.

• CHAPTER ELEVEN •

T
WO DAYS AFTER
Tommie’s arrest, his brother receives an anonymous letter written in a crabbed, childlike hand:

Dear Sir,

The honor of my family has sufered due to your brother. Because of this I think it is proper that I be payed for funeral expences and something more. We can discuss the amount. If you don’t come in a weeks time, I will come to you. There is no need to involve the courts in what we can settle like men. I will expect you soon.

Willie shows it to his aunt, who says he should take it to Constable Oliver right away. “He can’t get away with threatening us like that, after what we’ve been through.”

“So you think old man Madison wrote it?”

“It has to be. And anyway, it has a threatening tone, demanding money. Family honor! What family honor? They couldn’t raise her and now they’re trying to extort money from me. They know Tommie’s innocent and he’ll be home soon, so they’re striking while the iron’s hot. It’s reprehensible.”

“Well, I expect he’s angry,” Willie comments, “or at least he should be. But this isn’t the right way to show it. Why couldn’t he come over here, if he wants to settle it like men?”

“Just lazy. You know he wasn’t raised right himself. His mother died when he was little and his stepmother resented having to raise somebody else’s boy. She’d punish Howard by making him eat out with the dogs. Then his father died and there was nobody who cared for him atall. It was pathetic. He had a little collection of tin soldiers, and you know what she did? She put them in an iron skillet and stuck it in the oven—melted them down to sell to the junkman. Then he went and enlisted and nearly died of typhoid, and after the war he came back, and of all things, moved back into the farmhouse with his stepmother. She died not long after that, and then he married my niece, you see. The colored folks wouldn’t work for him. Bad as his stepmother was, he was even worse, I guess. We joked about it at the time, wondering how his stepmother really died.”

“But that was way back,” Willie says. He is trying not to think about Lillie, and how she would write to her mother, but never to her father.

“It makes you wonder, though, if he didn’t have something to do with this thing. There, I’ve gone and said what was on my mind.” She crosses herself, even though she isn’t Catholic, and whispers, “Forgive me.”

“With Lillie?”

“If he knew she was pregnant, and didn’t want the shame of it. He might’ve worked it someway with somebody up there. That nephew of his—Cary. Or those Dunstans. I’m suspicious, that’s all.”

Willie shakes his head. “It couldn’t be,” he says. “What kind of man would want his daughter dead?”
Could he have?
he thinks. “She got herself in trouble and drowned herself,” he tells Jane. “You remember that letter she wrote before she came here? ‘O, if suicide were not a sin’?”

“ ‘O if suicide were not a sin, how soon the lingering spark of my life would vanish.’ ” Jane shakes her head, dabbing a tear from the corner of her eye. “I thought she was being overly dramatic—going on so about what a terror her life was and how only Jesus understood her suffering.”

The following day Willie goes back up to Richmond, where he spends the next several days running errands for his brother. As in everything he does, he drives himself at a hard pace. What with keeping his business going, trying to keep the folks at home informed, and tending to his brother’s needs—fetching law books, tracking down possible alibi witnesses, taking messages to and from the lawyers, and a host of other tasks large and small—there is little room in his mind for one anonymous letter.

Mr. Lucas is on his knees replacing the loose boards in the corner of the fence. He has not paid attention to the fact that the key has worked its way up his shirt and is now dangling from his neck in plain view. But Mr. Meade sees it as he comes along to inspect the work, and he sees Mr. Lucas stuff the key into his shirt. It looked like a little cross, and he doesn’t want to embarrass Mr. Lucas, who seems intent on hiding the pendant. Yet he feels that a certain amount of curiosity about the people who work for him is not a bad thing. “Make it hard for them, Mr. Lucas,” he says. “I don’t want any more bodies in my reservoir.” Lucas nods, takes another nail out of his mouth, and continues hammering. “You know,” Meade tries, “I have a niece who married a Catholic boy. I’m a Baptist myself, but there’s nothing wrong with being a Roman Catholic … What are you, Mr. Lucas?”

“Baptist same as you,” Lucas says, speaking around three nails.

“That’s what I thought. I thought to myself, Mr. Lucas is a Baptist. So if he wears a cross around his neck that’d be his own business, and welcome to it.”

Lucas glances up, then goes on pounding, pausing on the upswings in case Mr. Meade has something more he wants to say. Lucas wishes he would just go away, but he knows his boss to be the kind of man who wants everything the same every single day. If something’s different—well, he notices it. The fact that a dead girl washed up in his reservoir hasn’t set right with Mr. Meade, has kind of shaken him, and Lucas wonders if indeed his boss did forget to lock that gate. And now they’ve gone and arrested a man for it, and yet Lucas does not want to go up there like everybody else and see what he looks like. He can’t understand why so many would, unless they feel guilty about it in some way, about a country girl coming here and getting herself killed like that in their own drinking water.

“I’m a man of science myself,” Meade prattles on. “I don’t have any superstitions, except that a dead body should leave the house feet first, because that’s how my people did. Friday the thirteenth is no different from any other day—although for that girl it was unlucky. There are people that wear charms, even men. My father kept a railway ticket stub in his wallet—he met my mother on that trip from Baltimore. How about you, Mr. Lucas? Do you wear a rabbit’s foot or any such?”

“No, I don’t,” Lucas says.

Mr. Meade thinks about that a minute. “I don’t believe in superstition,” he says. “But I do believe in the Bible where it says not to bear false witness.”

Mr. Meade knows his man, and Lucas knows he knows. Lucas takes the nails out of his mouth, puts them in his apron pocket, and stands up. He removes the string from his neck and shows it to Mr. Meade. “It’s not a cross, it’s just a key I found. I reckon it
is
for good luck, and I didn’t see any harm—”

“No harm atall,” Mr. Meade says, studying Lucas’s eyes. “That’s a nice little key. You say you found it?”

Lucas swallows, looks at the key sadly. “Yes, a matter of fact I found it not too far from here.” He hands it to Mr. Meade. “I was going to tell you about it, but it slipped my mind that first day, and then I guess I kind of got attached to it.”

“What first day?”

“The day after we found that girl.”

Mr. Meade looks weary. His nosiness has resulted in trouble for them both. “That’s not good,” he says.

“I didn’t mean to cause any trouble,” Lucas says. “I don’t think anybody’ll need it, do you?”

Mr. Meade studies the key a minute, then deliberates, stroking his neat little mustache as though making a life-changing decision. “What if they need it to convict that man?” he says.

“I don’t see how one little key would make a difference.”

Mr. Meade pockets it. “Still, I best take it to Justice Richardson.”

“I hope you won’t let me go for this, Mr. Meade. I been with you fourteen years.”

“I know that, Mr. Lucas. You’re the best worker I’ve ever had. I wish you had of spoken up about this, but I’ll stand by you.”

Lucas watches Mr. Meade making his way around the grounds toward the front gate. It’s just a little gold watch key—what possible use could anyone find for it, even if it was the girl’s? Now he’d never see it again. And he was going to have to explain himself to more than Mr. Meade. Of course they’d need it—it was her key.

Willie sees Madison first. Sees him sitting with his cronies, his hat dangling cowboy-style behind his neck, leaning over a schooner, a fist of cards clutched as tight as gold. Willie is in King William on business a week after Tommie’s arrest and has stopped by the Manquin tavern for something to eat. He does not want to go out of his way to avoid Madison, nor does he wish to confront him, so he takes a seat at the bar and orders a bowl of stew. The place smells strongly of beer, cigar smoke, and damp cedar, and, built out of stone a century earlier, is always cold. But it is familiar to Willie and he likes the food and the bartender, who never fails to inquire after his family.

Willie has not been there five minutes before he feels a tap on his back. He turns and sees Madison, standing there folding his arms across his chest. He appears not to have shaved for a week, his fringe of hair sprocketed at odd angles and his small beady eyes bloodshot. Despite his appearance he manages to fix upon Willie a look of complete concentration, his head back and low as though ready for a fight.

“I was very sorry to hear about your daughter,” Willie says, offering his hand.

Madison glances at the hand as if assessing its value. His thick lips spread into the suggestion of a smile. “You’re late,” he says. “You ready to discuss business?”

“You have something you want to sell me, Mr. Madison?”

The bartender comes in from the kitchen building and puts Willie’s stew down. “Thank you,” Willie says, turning his back on Madison. “Mr. Franklin, you’re the second main reason I stop here.” He takes a spoonful and blows on it. “And this is the first.” He swallows the stew, then turns back to Madison.

“Matter of fact, I do,” Madison says. Willie waits, then returns his attention to his bowl. “Come on out to the Tayloe place and we’ll discuss it,” Madison goes on. “Me and the boys are going up there for a hen-pullin’. Not far down the road.”

“I know where it is,” Willie says. “I know Mr. Tayloe quite well. I’ve done work for him.”

“Then I’ll see you there. Or at my place. Suit yourself.” He goes back to his table, and Willie finishes and leaves without ever casting another glance Madison’s way. He is going past the Tayloe place anyway, to trade a hatchet for a bucksaw with a man who mangled an arm in a railcar coupling and has no further use for a two-handed saw. The fact that Madison can’t trouble himself to cross the river to issue a threat does not mean that he is going to forget about it. Willie knows men of Madison’s stripe, old men who have room in their minds for only one or two things, usually money and how to get it. A debt such a man felt he was owed would weigh on him like the thought of meeting Jesus.

Willie decides it might be best to settle the matter now. He has become at twenty-four a man of few words, simple tastes, and unswerving reliability. If he says he’ll deliver a cart of hardwood timber at ten o’clock, he will not be there at ten-fifteen with three-quarters of a load of pine, though the delivery point is three hours distant, the roads muddy, and his partner sick; that is how he stays in business and how he tries to conduct his life.

Willie turns up the narrow wooded lane that leads to the clearing where Madison and his friends are gathered. He is surprised that Tayloe allows any such foolishness on his property, but likely one of the men has some business relationship which confers hunting and other privileges—that, or Tayloe simply doesn’t know. When Willie gets there two men on horseback are stringing a taut line as high as they can reach between two trees. Madison acknowledges Willie with a curt nod, then rides to the middle of the line carrying a burlap sack. He reaches in and pulls out a plump chicken that flaps its wings so hard Madison nearly drops it. From a pocket, Madison produces a piece of string, with which he binds the chicken’s feet together. He then ties the feet to the overhead line.

The men now arrange themselves some thirty paces behind the line. As the first man rides forward, Madison finally turns to Willie. “A goose works best,” he says, “but they’re expensive. With cats you have to be careful of the claws, and it’s more trouble than it’s worth since you can’t eat ’em.” The man canters past the hanging fowl, reaching for it but only grazing a wing; the hen nonetheless lets loose a terrific squawk.

“Get in line behind me,” Madison tells Willie. “And have you a turn.” Willie says he’ll wait, then watches as the second rider grasps the hen’s head and gives it a short yank. The bird is still much alive as Madison, fourth in line, digs his heels into his barrel-bellied roan and trots forward. Gaining speed, he rises from his saddle, gives the neck a little twist, and watches over his shoulder as the hen circles the line like an acrobat. He rides back to the others, smiling as if he’d just performed at Mozart Hall.

The men go through again, the bird with its neck stretched yet still able to move a wing. The idea, Willie realizes, is not to kill the bird, which is dead by the end of the second round. “Watch this,” Madison says, grinning with tobacco-stained teeth at Willie. He rides forward as fast as he can, reaches up with a practiced hand and snaps the bird’s head off. The carcass bounces up and down, spewing blood, and the men cheer. One of them goes and cuts the hen down and gives it to Madison, who then pops it back into the burlap sack with a satisfied look on his face. “Thank you, gentlemen,” he says, shaking hands. He excuses himself to tend to some business.