The Slow Moon (21 page)

Forty-four

C
ARL CAME HOME
at two. He was leaving to pick up Johnny at camp this afternoon. Johnny had been away for the last two weeks in July, and Carl looked forward to driving him home.

Helen heard Carl’s car door slam, and she met him in the hallway as he came in. “Have you heard yet?”

“What happened?” Carl put down a large folder of papers and went to fix a drink.

“Bobby confessed to Sophie’s rape. So did Casey Willig and Tom Canady. Charlie Post came by and told me,” she said.

“What’s Charlie saying?” Carl didn’t believe it.

Helen shook her head. “It’s not what Charlie says, it’s what Sophie told. It’s what Bobby Bailey told the police.”

Carl drank long sips of his bourbon. “My God, Helen.”

“They’ve all turned themselves in.”

“Crow’s friends.” Carl shook his head. “And they let him be blamed. Go through a trial. I can’t believe it.”

“Charlie wondered if Crow knew anything about it.” Helen spoke tentatively.

“What’re you saying? Did Charlie make some accusation against Crow?”

“He didn’t accuse. He just asked us if we had ever questioned Crow about his friends.”

“Damn. Of course we did! And so did the police, the D.A., Butler…We had a whole trial. Crow was acquitted. Isn’t that enough?” Carl looked enormously sad. He downed the last of his drink and got up for a refill.

“Stop yelling at me! That’s exactly what I told Charlie.”

Carl walked into the kitchen. He wanted to get away from her. “I hope Johnny will be easier to raise than Crow,” he mumbled. “I don’t expect to go through anything like this again.”

Helen lifted herself out of the chair. “Because Johnny is
yours
?” She followed Carl to the kitchen. “How convenient for you to be able to choose when you claim someone and when you disclaim them!” She was yelling.

He kept his back to her, looking at the floor. “Helen, I wasn’t saying that. You know I didn’t mean that.”

Helen was working up to something hard-edged. “Haven’t you ever done anything wrong, Carl? If I know something about you, something that has been kept secret for a long time, if I find out about it, what do you think I do?”

“Helen?” He looked up now, surprised at her fervor. He hadn’t expected the conversation to go in this direction.

Helen took her words further than she had meant to go. “You think I should disclaim you because you’ve done something reprehensible?” She had her hands on her face, weeping into them. Carl walked over to her.

“Helen.” He didn’t know what to say.

“I want you to speak to him, Carl. You need to talk to him.”

“I don’t believe Crow knew more than he told us,” said Carl. “Damn that Charlie.” He shook his head. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll talk to him.” But Carl couldn’t leave Helen, couldn’t leave the room. “I know I’ve hurt you,” he said.

“We all hurt each other.” She buried her face in his shoulder. “We hurt each other all the time.”

When Crow came downstairs, his mother said, “Do you know?”

The back lot of Crow’s memory kept the shock of that night hanging precipitously in his mind. As the memory came forward again, his face grew haggard. A white haze fogged his mind. He nodded.

“What did you hear?” Carl asked.

“Bobby went with Tom and Casey to confess. Bobby told me before he told the sheriff.”

“Is that why he was here?” Helen asked. “He told you then?”

“Yes.” Crow’s voice took on the timbre of a young child.

Carl felt like a relic asking these questions. His voice seemed to have an odd inflection. “So you didn’t know anything until…?”

“Until today.” Crow grew angry at this third degree.

“I had to ask,” said Carl. “I just had to ask you about it. That’s all.”

Helen had left the room, trying to take in the news of Bobby, but she could see them both through a space between the hinges of the door. She saw Crow’s stringy muscles and Carl’s jaunty underlip.

She saw Crow’s hands worrying his forehead and hair, and she tried to push from her eyes the image of her son’s unchildlike face.

When Crow looked at his father, he held a hard, straight glance. He wanted to bring out all their secrets. “Now, let me ask
you
something,” he said.

“What’s that?” Helen saw the dread creep into Carl’s face.

But Crow’s question went unasked, because at that moment someone knocked loudly at the door and Carl stood up. Helen answered the door and entered the room with two men. “They’re asking where Johnny is,” Helen said. “These men work at the camp. They say that Johnny is gone.”

“He’s been missing for almost five hours,” one man said. “The camp director has been trying to reach you.” He looked at Carl with eyes that could not find a place to land.

“Mr. Davenport.” The other man stood very still. “Your son has been reported missing. Though there’s been no evidence of foul play. Do you know where he is?”

“I was going to pick him up today. This was his last day at camp.”

“He was going to pick him up,” Helen said dumbly.

“Well, sir. We think that he ran off. He took some of his clothes with him, and some camping gear. Somebody could have taken him, but we think he more than likely ran away.”

Helen screamed. “Carl? Carl?”

“Well, I don’t believe that,” Carl said. He touched Crow’s shoulder. Everything that happened from now on, he felt, would be completely his fault.

Helen could not move. Outside the hills rose, and trees wilted in the heat. Everything looked as though it wanted to sit down.

“Did anybody at the camp say where he might be?” Crow asked.

Both men took a step toward them. “Can we sit down?” one asked, and led Carl, Helen, and Crow into the living room, as if they were guests in a new home.

Forty-five

A
URELIA
B
AILEY STOOD
in the kitchen pouring a cup of tea when she heard someone knock at the back door. Dog, napping under the table, lifted his head, ambled to the door. She thought of the dream she had had last night about a visitor who came to the house, one who kept knocking but, when she opened the door, was nowhere to be seen. Then she heard knocking again at another door, or at a window. She wasn’t afraid in the dream, but when she awoke she thought the experience nightmarish. She imagined her mind playing tricks on her, and she ignored the knocking. She put some honey in her tea and decided to go in late to the office.

She heard the knock again, louder this time, more urgent. She went to open the door and saw a young deputy standing before her. His manner was serious, but his hands twitched nervously. She didn’t like the lack of confidence that seemed to go with his youthful appearance. He looked like someone who was performing a task for the first time.

“Mrs. Bailey?” he said. Not
Judge
Bailey, but
Mrs.

“Yes?” She knew what he would say, and thought of the persistent knocking in last night’s dream.

“Your son’s turned himself in.”

Aurelia’s knees grew weak, and the young officer caught her as she began to buckle. She stiffened as he took her arm.

“He’s at the station now?” she asked, her judgelike voice trying to take hold. It was here.

“Yes, ma’am,” the officer said. “I’ll drive you.” His name tag read
ALEX JAMISON
. He looked not much older than Bobby.

“Just a minute,” she said. Then, “No, you go ahead. I’ll take my car.”

Aurelia disappeared upstairs and yelled something to the officer in a tone that sounded dismissive; so Deputy Jamison closed the door, got into his car, and waited for her to come back down and drive her car around front, then pull out onto the road. He followed her to the police station.

Bobby sat in a chair with his hands in his lap. When he saw his mother enter the room he tried to read her face. She had hoped for a chance to speak to him before the D.A. came in, though Jeb Wall had already thought of that too and had started talking casually to all three boys. She whispered something to Jeb, and he nodded.

She looked at her son, trying to ask him with her eyes what he had said, but Bobby’s expression was sheeplike and foreign.

She’d seen them first through the one-way glass: Bobby at the table, an investigator sitting across from him, and Jeb standing, very tall it seemed, behind Bobby. She saw their heads and bodies, their faces in bas-relief. When she entered the room, she felt a change in their mood.

The police investigator looked up slowly and acknowledged Judge Bailey’s presence. His skin stretched tight, like a balloon, and he squinted in concentration as he began to ask another question. Wall stopped him. The afternoon dwindled into evening, and the idea of her son going to jail seemed more a part of last night’s dream than today’s reality.

“May I speak to him a moment?” she asked. “Could I take him outside and speak to him?”

Jeb Wall nodded.

Bobby walked out of the station and sat with her on the courthouse steps, his head bent forward.

Aurelia could not tell from his face if he felt remorse, guilt, or fear. She’d never before seen this particular expression and wondered if it was false, or if every expression up until that moment had been false—this one being true. His skin, a sick blue shade, and his breathing, slow, made him seem oddly unfamiliar.

“Are you going to talk about this now or later?” she asked, not without anger.

“I don’t know.”

“Then let’s say
now.
”

Bobby looked as though he might pass out.

“You will go to jail. You know that already, I guess.”

He did not know she meant now, today.

She paused. “You’ve been lying to me about everything.” It was not a question.

“You lied to me too. You lied to me my whole life.” Bobby began to sob, his head down. His shoulders shook with despair. Aurelia leaned to hold him. She already believed that what Bobby had done arose out of the secret she had built around his father. She was alarmed to realize that this secret had caused more harm than Robert’s own particular disgrace, or his actual absence.

“Can we go home?” Bobby asked.

“No,” she said. She could not believe how much he didn’t understand. “I have to take you back in there. I’ll get a lawyer and try to get you out on bail, but it may not be possible.”

She held him until the sobbing lessened, then they went back into the station. She promised again that she would try to help him.

When Aurelia entered her house, the wind blew and rattled the windows, reminding her of the knocking, and the absolute end of life as she had known it before last night’s dream.

Forty-six

“S
EEMS LIKE NOTHING
good happens anymore,” Louise told George.

“Why you say that?”

“Because it’s true. One thing after another—those boys’ confessions yesterday, and now this thing with Johnny disappearing. I’m going over to see Helen. I dread seeing her face. What am I going to say, George?”

“Just be a friend to her, I guess.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, God. All I could think about was if this was my Antony—if Antony turned up missing, I don’t know what I’d do. What am I gonna say to her, George?”

“Won’t matter what you say. Hell, you can’t really say anything. Just go on over there now. Talk to her a little.”

Louise drove up to the Davenport house and got out. Helen sat by herself in the living room, dressed like she was going to church. Her face was blank, no expression at all; then as she choked back a greeting, she leaned her face down into her lap.

“I don’t want to upset you,” Louise said.

“No, come in. I count on you to be the one to come by when I need somebody.”

“Where’s Carl? And Crow?”

“Carl went into town. He’s coming back in a little while.” She looked up, her face and eyes pooling into a mask. “Crow’s upstairs.” The pain moved beneath her skin, hovering, steel-edged.

Louise sat beside her on the couch.

“When the men from the camp came by and told us Johnny was missing, Louise, I couldn’t stop screaming. I couldn’t stop. I thought they had told me he was dead. I thought that’s what they were not saying, you know? I’d be screaming now if my doctor hadn’t dosed me up on pills.”

Louise nodded. “I know,” she said. “You keep thinking you could lose him. I know about that.” She reached for Helen, then pulled back, not wanting to touch such raw heat.

“Carl looks smashed down,” Helen said.

“What can I do?” Louise asked. The muscles in the back of her neck began to ache. “Oh, Helen.”

Helen pressed her mouth tight, trying to keep her lips from trembling. “When I was young, kids didn’t have such a dangerous world. Nobody would’ve raped somebody’s girlfriend. That was what
criminals
did, not regular boys. And I never knew anybody who ran away. I think somebody’s taken him.” She had not even let herself think this thought, and now she said it out loud.

“You just wait,” Louise said. “Thing’s are going to be fine.” She squeezed Helen’s arm. “You’ve got to hold on now.”

Helen struggled to do just that, to hold on. “Sometimes I wonder if we try to protect our kids from too much, then when they enter the real world, they’re not ready.”

Louise didn’t know where this was going, but she could see how Helen’s talk was unraveling a fierce knot inside her. “You can’t really protect ’em,” she said. “That’s the thing.”

Helen leaned forward. “What do we do?”

She heard the back door slam and jumped. “Carl, that you?” She looked up quickly, her eyes wild.

Carl walked into the living room. “Any news?”

Helen shook her head.

Crow came downstairs and stood behind his father. They looked as separate as stones.

“You want to go with us to the camp, Louise?” asked Carl.

“No. I got to get back home.”

“Okay. Crow and I will wait outside,” Carl told Helen. “You come on when you’re ready.”

Helen nodded. Her hair was unwashed, though brushed, and she wore no makeup. Her long fingernails had been chewed down to nubs, and dried blood clotted in the corners. Louise felt she could see a tiny pin shining in the center of Helen, piercing her just below the heart. She could
see
it: a sliver piercing the edges of ventricle, cutting away at tissue and vein. A hot white pin embedded in sinew and muscle.

It could take years for that to go away,
thought Louise.
Years.

Helen stood up and turned out the light. Through the kitchen window they could see the bright weather of the day. Both women thought that if they looked hard enough, they might see the face of the God they both trusted, some contour of a face that was recognizable against the endless canvas of blue sky. They both wanted to see it.

As Louise drove away, she thought about the suffering of white people, how it had never seemed the same as, or even comparable to, the suffering of blacks. She had always felt that way, and even felt superior because of the difference; but sitting with Helen she knew that she, Louise Burden, had not had Helen’s troubles. She saw how no one but Helen could hold her particular load.

Then Louise wondered, for the first time, if she had taught Antony how to bear his own sadness, or had taught him to blame. Had she allowed him to resent others for what he didn’t have? George liked to blame. He liked to resent and hold a grudge. It frightened her to think of what she had taught, or not taught, Antony. And in the secret part of her heart she hoped that Antony knew nothing, nothing whatsoever, about the problems of these white boys.

George and Antony waited for her on the porch. Antony kicked at his shoe. Both looked so handsome in their bright white shirts. “You look nice,” Louise told them, and George got in the front seat.

“We’re taking you out for dinner,” he said. And they drove in silence to the nearest restaurant.