The Wedding Machine (24 page)

“Get out of my house,” Hilda turns around to say. She walks briskly back to the front door and firmly shoves Angus out onto the piazza before slamming the door behind him. She can hear him pacing on the front stoop as she locks the knob and the dead bolt.

“Hilda!” he shouts to the closed door. “There's more I want to say to you.”

Her head pounds now. A migraine coming on. She pulls at her hair as the pain creeps across the sides of her skull. The back of her nightgown is soaking wet, and she unfastens her robe as he continues, “This conversation is not over.”

Then, as if by instinct, she runs to the dining room and grabs two of the four large square sterling candlesticks that one of the mill executives gave her as a wedding gift decades ago. They are solid and feel heavy in her hands, like dumbbells.

She can hear him clearing his throat and tapping his fingers on the door, and she unlocks it, opens it fast and hurls one of the candlesticks as hard as she can at his shoulder.

“What are you doing?” he says, grabbing the top of his right arm. “That hurt!”

Before he has a chance to step back, she throws the other one. It hits him right above his left eye, and a small gash forms just above his brow.

“What the heck?” He pats his forehead and examines the blood on his hand as she runs back in the dining room and grabs the last two candlesticks.

When he sees her coming, he turns and trots toward his car, holding his hand against his brow.

Now Hilda runs into the front garden, her bare feet slapping the cool, mossy bricks of her walkway. She watches Angus slam his car door and examine his wound in the rearview mirror. He pulls a handkerchief out of his back pocket and presses it against his right eye as Hilda swings open the wrought iron gate and steps directly in front of his car. She bangs on the hood of his sedan with the candlesticks, first the one in her right hand, then the one in the left.

“Hilda!” he screams.

A young family, the Maybanks, happen upon this scene on their walk home from church. Mr. Maybank quickly grabs both of his daughters by the elbow and herds them over to the opposite side of the street as his wife follows closely behind, her sling-back heels clapping against the road.

Hilda continues to bang on the hood of Angus's car with the square silver candlesticks. Her robe falls open and her long white nightgown is damp and clinging to her sides as she delivers one blow after another, leaving deep dents across the smooth, blue surface of his Lincoln sedan.

Angus honks his horn as if to send a warning, then reverses quickly, holding the bloodied handkerchief over his eye. He turns the car around as she lurches forward and makes like she might chase him down the road in her bare feet.

She tries not to look across the street, where the Maybank girls in their pale blue smocked dresses can't help but stop and stare at the drama unfolding on the corner of Third and Rantowles. In fact, two other cars have stopped and pulled over to the opposite side of the road as if this were a show.
The most privileged gal in Jasper coming
apart at the seams
.

She can feel them all watching her as she drops the candlesticks in the street, ties her robe tight and walks back through the wrought iron gate and beneath the Lady Banksia rose vines, her chest rising and falling quickly in an effort to catch her breath.

When she gets in the house, she locks and bolts the door, then looks at her sweaty, haggard reflection in the gold gilded mirror in the foyer.

Someone knocks on her door. A male voice says, “Mrs. Prescott? Mrs. Prescott, you all right in there?”

She turns and heads up the stairs as the man continues to knock, and the chatter of the onlookers rises and swells on the street in front of her gate. She locks herself in her bedroom and falls into her unmade bed.

It is true.
She stares at the crack in the ceiling above her bed.
I
will die alone. I will waste away in this house by myself.
Then she turns and pounds the pillows in the place next to her, before kicking them off her bed.

FOURTEEN

Ray

Ray checks her watch. She's in an after-church meeting about the Healing Prayer Revival Day that Vangie organized, but she would prefer to be having her teeth filed.

She just couldn't say no to Vangie this time, what with a gator on her property devouring Vangie's dog right before her very eyes. It will just be a few months of this nonsense, and then the revival day will be over and done, and perhaps by that point Vangie will have set her sights on another Lowcountry town to sell off or evangelize. “Now, here's a sample schedule of how we held this day at my old church in Houston,” Vangie says as she licks her finger and passes out the stacks of papers to the vestry members.

“First we started with teaching and preaching, then moved to the laying on of hands for those who wanted prayer, and we concluded with the Generational Healing Eucharist.”

“The laying on of hands?” Gus Dowdy, the town pharmacist, asks. “What do you mean by that?”

“Well,” says Vangie, blinking her big, round eyelids and clapping her hands together once. “That's where we invite folks to come forward for prayer and two or three of us will gather around them, put our hands on them, and pray for whatever their need might be.”

Gus nods his head. “They don't start acting funny, do they? Like the folks on TV?”

“Well,” says Capers, “I've been to a few of these kinds of things before and the Holy Spirit can manifest itself in a number of ways. It is possible that someone might weep or feel a burning sensation or even rest in the Spirit.”

Ray rolls her eyes. She can't understand why Capers would support such outlandish notions. He's from a nice Charleston family, but somewhere along the way she thinks a screw came loose. Rumor has it he was swept up in this whole church
renewal
movement, and now he talks about the Holy Spirit all the time. Sometimes he even claps his hands, closes his eyes, and sways to the hymns in church. And just last Sunday she saw him lifting his hands up to the sky during the “Doxology
.”
It's doggone irreverent. What would Queen Elizabeth I think of all of this?

“Yes!” Vangie reaches across the table to squeeze Capers's hand. “It's true about the resting. That's why I'm going to bring some of my smaller Oriental rugs to put around the front of the church. We don't want anyone to fall down on a hard surface.”

“Oh my,” says the elderly Mrs. Henrietta Graydon. “I've never seen a thing like that in the Episcopal church.”

“Me neither,” says Gus. “Sounds kind of Pentecostal to me. You aren't going to have any snakes around, are you?”

Ray can't help but laugh. She loves watching these older folks set Capers and Vangie straight.

Just as Capers opens his Bible to defend the practice of the laying on of hands, Justin comes riding up to the window on his bicycle.

“Aunt Ray,” he says, as he cups his hands around his eyes and peers inside. “Come on out. Mrs. Prescott's in trouble.”

“Excuse me, y'all,” Ray says, and she hurries outside of the parish hall where she meets Justin in the parking lot.

“What happened, son?”

“It's Mrs. Prescott, Aunt Ray. Henry Hamrick says she flipped her lid. She was banging on the Doc's car with some kind of ginormous candlesticks.”

“Oh, no.” Ray covers her mouth.

“And there was blood too,” Justin says. “Drops of it all across the sidewalk.”

Ray runs into the sanctuary where Sis is reorganizing the music for the choir. She calls up to the balcony, “Something's happened to Hilda! Come on!”

Sis runs down in her choir robe, and they dash next door to the parish hall kitchen where Kitty B. is packaging up a leftover tray of ladyfingers from the after-church coffee hour. She drops her tray in the sink and follows them.

“I wonder what in the world happened,” Kitty B. says as they race down Church Street toward Third.

“Well, we won't know until we ask,” Ray says. “Let's get on over there and talk to her.”

When they get to Hilda's house there is a handful of onlookers, mostly teenagers, milling about the sidewalk.

“Y'all go on.” Ray shoos them away with one flap of the back of her hand. The gals scuttle through the garden toward the door where they take turns banging for twenty minutes. They don't hear a peep out of Hilda.

“I'll be right back.” Ray makes two fists and heads through the gates.

She runs home and gets the megaphone that Cousin Willy uses from time to time on the campaign trail. She marches back into Hilda's front garden and yells into the mouthpiece, “Hilda, if you don't come down here right now, I'm going to call the police and have them tear down this front door. Do you hear me?”

For a moment Ray thinks she spots some movement behind the curtains upstairs in Hilda's bedroom, and they wait for several minutes on the front piazza for the door to open.

When it doesn't, Kitty B. plops down on the porch, takes off her heels, and rubs at her swollen feet. Sis takes off her choir robe and joins Kitty B. as Ray paces back and forth, considering their next move.

“Y'all think I should call up again?”

“No,” Sis says. “Let's give her a little while.”

“Wonder what happened,” Kitty B. says, trying to hold back a walrus-sized yawn. “Should we call Angus?”

Just then Ray's cell phone rings, and Cousin Willy is on the other end. She pops off her clip-on pearls and pulls the phone close to her ear. “Where are you?”

“Well, I'm sitting here with Angus in the emergency room in Ravenel. He drove out to the deer stand with a gash the size of my thumb across his forehead and asked me if I would tote him over here.”

“Well, what did he say happened?” She looks at the girls, and she can feel the worry lines forming across her forehead.

“He and Trudi have a set a date to get married,” Willy says. “He went over to tell Hilda, and she went berserk. Threw a bunch of silver at him and beat on his car.”

“Oh, my word,” Ray says. “Is he all right?”

“Nothing a few stitches won't take care of.”

Ray snaps her phone shut and gives the gals the news in a hushed tone. Sis grabs her mouth and her eyes start to water.

“Poor Hilda,” Kitty B. says, shaking her head back and forth so that her gray strings of hair sway this way and that. She leans forward and says in a hushed tone, “I think she always thought he would come back.”

Ray shakes her head and studies the black Vaneli pumps she bought at Belk's the last time she was in Charleston. They're scuffed up now from her dash back to the house for the megaphone.

She sits down on the arm of the bench. “I'm worried about her in there. Do y'all think I should get someone over here to get this door open?”

Just as the words come out of her mouth, a piece of Hilda's fine Crane's monogrammed stationery slips out of the mail slot in the front door and lands on the brick floor of the piazza.

Sis jumps up and grabs it. Then she reads it to the others:

“Don't you dare call the police, Ray Montgomery. I'm not dead, and I'm not planning on doing anything else destructive today. However, I will not come out of this house. I won't come out today, I won't come out this year, and I might not come out this
decade.
If you try to get in here by force, you'll regret it. It will be over my dead body. Do you understand?” Sis looks up. “And it's signed H.”

Ray shakes her head in frustration as Sis folds the note back. Just who does Hilda thinks she is, threatening her like that? And anyway, how in the world is she going to survive in there?

“Anybody have a pen?” Sis asks.

“What in the world for?” Ray says.

“I'm going to write her back.”

“Oh, good.” Kitty B. offers a sticky pen she's scrounged up from the bottom of her large, lumpy pocketbook. “I think you should.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” Ray says, grabbing the pen out of Kitty B.'s hand. She throws the pen on the bricks and runs over to the door and starts banging on it.

“Hilda, open this door right now! I know you're downstairs, and we want to lay our eyes on you.”

Ray runs over to the window and peers inside, but Hilda is nowhere to be seen. The inside of the house looks perfectly intact except for the dining room where four long white candles lie haphazardly around the Oriental rug beneath the table.

Ray picks up the megaphone and starts to holler to the upstairs. “Now just what are you going to do? Stay in there forever? How do you plan on surviving? Barbour's Grocery only delivers on Tuesdays now!”

“Wednesdays,” Sis whispers.

“Oh, whatever,” Ray shouts. “Now stop this foolishness and let us in!”

Sis, who pulled the pen out of the bricks just after Ray threw it down, shows Kitty B. what she wrote on the back side of the note, then she slips it through the mail slot.

“Don't play her stupid game, Sis!” Ray calls through the megaphone. “She's got to grow up and come out. She can't spend another year cooped up in here.”

“Ray,” Kitty B. says gently. “I think you need to settle down, honey.”

“Me too,” Sis says, turning to face Ray. “Hilda's had what may be the worst day of her life, and the last thing she needs is for us to shout at her through some megaphone. She needs some time, and if we're her friends, we should give it to her.”

Ray rolls her eyes at them both. Then she puts the apparatus back to her mouth. “I'm coming back tomorrow, Hilda. And I expect you to open this durn door!”

“Ray,” Sis calmly pulls the megaphone out of her clutches. “Stop that.”

Kitty B. nods and neither of them look away when Ray stares them both down.

Ray grabs her forehead. “I don't see how y'all can put up with this dramatic nonsense. I can hardly stand it anymore.”