Uncertain Ground (6 page)

Delivering my account, I watched her face carefully. Except for the shape of it and the olive color, she hardly looked kin to the other Chandlers, to Estes, or Mother or Uncle Blanton. It was peculiar how brother and sisters could look so unalike. There was Kenyon, dark-haired like all the Chandlers, while I was decidedly kin to the Hendersons with my light hair and eyes the same blue as my grandmother’s. Bertha’s skin was badly wrinkled. Though smooth on her cheekbones, it fell in little lines under her eyes. Gray already, large bosomed, she was not pretty, nor according to earlier pictures, had she ever been. She was imposing, not dignified or stuffy but strong. With no children of her own, all the Chandlers, I supposed, were her children. The eldest certainly, Bertha remained the stoutest—she said so herself—and my father said, “the most decorated.” She loved diamonds and wore them sprinkled about like raindrops in pins, a watch, earrings, rings.

They flashed on her fingers while she was busy picking out bits of shell from a bowl of fresh crabmeat.

“What was it this time, Celia?”

“The beach. I left you a note. I went down to get Emmett.”

“No, that’s not what I’m worried about. What is Emmett drunk on this time?”

I shifted from one foot to the other before sitting down in the chair across the kitchen table from her. “He’s not terribly drunk. He drank some beer this afternoon.” I dodged her question wondering at the same time why I bothered. Bertha could bear to hear the truth although she wouldn’t like it.

“He’s going to turn out just like Blanton if we don’t watch him.”

I’d seen Blanton once at his home in Laredo and three times at our house in Leon, all Thanksgiving visits. Though supposedly alcoholic, I’d never seen him drunk even if both Bertha and my mother vowed he was often. All the Chandler men drank. So did the women, though they drank a lot less. On holidays the men, my father joining them, settled in overstuffed chairs in my parents’ big back bedroom to drink. They said they were staying out of the women’s way in the kitchen. Actually Uncle Blanton and Uncle Estes hardly knew what to do with themselves inside. They talked about politics a little, commented on Southwest Conference football, spoke of livestock, of horses, weather—the long drought especially—the market for cows, calves, and sheep. I would overhear them when I was sent to call them to the table. Ice rattled in their bourbon, and their voices rumbled together slowly like bears’ growling companionably in a nearby cave. Most of the time my father listened. He was an engineer and knew nothing about ranching. It took both uncles a long time to say anything much, yet he liked their talk. Nobody came to the table drunk.

“Aunt Bertha, do you really think Uncle Blanton drinks too much?”

“He always has. When he bought land down on the border, he stayed too much alone at first, trying to make a go of it, then he waited too long to marry. We used to hope he’d slack off, and he just grew into it. I see Emmett’s inclined in the same direction.”

“Maybe he’s just trying it out, seeing what it does to him. Boys do that a lot at school.”

“He’d be a little dumb not to know that by now.” Bertha smiled and shoved her chair back. With one hand she reached for a spoon about to fall off the counter’s edge behind her. Catching it just in time, she carried it with her over to the stove. She cooked in slapdash fashion, stirring pots just before they ran over or slightly after, pouring steaming food into bowls which barely held it. Jumbling spices on her shelves with sauce sticky fingers so the labels were barely legible, selecting each one with judicious pinches, moving lids, adjusting flames, she juggled her way to supper. Her meals were not timed since she seemed to rely on her nose to tell her when various dishes were done, yet food always seemed to be ready when everybody was hungry, and it was marvelous food.

“Celia, hand me those hot pads over there. Never can find them when I want them. And the salt. What did I do with the salt?”

Before I could point it out, her hand landed on the salt cellar.

I set the table and strayed into the living room to find Uncle Mowrey. He was sitting in his chair, his fat legs showing beneath
The Wall Street Journal.
Because he was an accountant and played the stock market with such success, the men in the family joked about picking up
The Journal
when Mowrey put it down just to see if he’d underlined anything. He didn’t talk about his investments. In fact since he seldom spoke at all, his silences weren’t threatening; they were puzzling. I’d asked my mother why he didn’t talk, and she said he’d never had much conversation.

Bertha was teaching in Galveston when they met, and the first time he came to Mullin with her he was so quiet Uncle Estes thought maybe something was wrong with him. Around the Chandlers Aunt Bertha continued to do most of the talking.

Now, during my second visit, I wondered again at Mowrey’s long silences. Was he half listening, half wandering in his own
world as I’d done as a child? Was he resentful of everybody else’s chatter? Slowly I began to understand that Mowrey depended on Bertha to do the talking in most social situations. She wanted to engage other people while he would only speak about what he knew. If a conversation moved to history, Mowrey might join it. Generally he talked to me about only one subject, Galveston, which he seemed to love more than any place in the world. Bertha once said he’d been planning to leave since he was nine years old but, of course, he never had.

I handed him a gin and tonic she had mixed. He accepted it with a noise made deep in his throat implying thanks, and looking up at me, he lowered his paper slightly.

“Uncle Mowrey, did Laffite really bury treasure here?”

“No one’s sure. That’s why everybody digs.”

“But do you think he did?”

“I don’t know. I think people want to believe it’s there. Pirate treasure … something to hunt for. Kept Emmett busy all that visit.” He smiled. “Laffite. … He’s hard to pin down. Some of the old romancers saw him as a brave buccaneer taking Texas’s side against the Spanish. Others remember Galveston began on uncertain ground…claimed by Mexico, by Spain, by the U.S. And islands were open to pirates. Laffite was the best known. He was a slave trader, something most people forget, and he traded whisky most probably. My guess is he was an opportunist, not particularly loyal to anyone. But people generally overlook that. Usually they remember he was a pirate who hated Spain and painted his house red. I guess we love rascals. They seem to get away with more.”

Bertha called from the kitchen that supper was about ready and told me to holler at Emmett.

I did and when there was no answer, ran upstairs to find him asleep again. He slept on his back, one arm outflung, looking, even while sleeping, as if he could wake immediately like a wary animal on the edge of action.

I thought of my friend Claire who’d dated him. She’d told me, “Emmett’s not for reforming. He kept me out till three
drinking bourbon! I don’t like bourbon! I don’t even like to drink. I like drinking with Emmett. The trouble is I can’t trust myself around him.”

Claire wouldn’t go out with him anymore. She was bright, practical, on her way somewhere, not to just anybody’s bed, nor to Emmett’s car’s back seat. Well neither was I, yet I had to admit he was dangerous to me also. Even if I was sometimes furious at him, I was often attracted. And why this had to be, I couldn’t begin to understand. All I knew was I had to avoid giving in. It looked like we’d have to go on living together while Aunt Bertha and I claimed kinship, and he ignored it.

I stood in the doorway and called his name. My fingers fell on the door’s old heavily varnished oak frame, traced the small wooden grooves outlining it. The long twilight filtered through the shutters of the windows behind our two narrow beds divided by a strip of faded rag rug, washed over the white cotton spreads I’d pulled up to cover the pillows that morning. Emmett’s boots stood toe to toe on the floor, his body sprawled aslant his bed, the ceiling fan whirred through the damp air. I saw it all so clearly, saw then that what seemed most forbidden could become what was most desired.

“Wake up, damn it!” I practically shouted at him, at myself.

Bertha seemed surprised when I said I would like to go to mass with her. “Are you sure? It’s all in Latin. You won’t understand a thing.”

“I’ve been to Catholic churches before with friends. I don’t mind not understanding. Look!” I showed her a little white straw pillbox. “I even brought something to put on my head just in case you asked me.”

Face powder clouded around her shoulders as she brushed it off and settled her own red poppy covered hat on top of her frizzy curls. “At least in the Catholic Church, they appreciate hats.” She checked to see if her earrings had been screwed on tight enough by shaking her head. “You’re not to tell anybody in the family. They’ll think I’m trying to convert you.”

“I won’t tell. Anyway … who would ask?”

“I don’t know. Someone will. There’s nothing bigger than family curiosity. I know. I’ve got it myself. Come on if you’re determined to go. I never keep anybody away from church.”

The Church of the Sacred Heart was a great blinding white building topped with a Moorish looking dome and two crenellated towers sprouting
fleur de lis
at regular intervals. Below a succession of arches outlined the entrance. Since it stood in the midst of tall palms, to me it looked more like a sultan’s palace in a 1940’s Hollywood spectacular than a church.

I was in a slippery state about religion, half scornful, half wondering, a fretful agnostic. Sitting quite still during the mass, I watched the priest and altar boys. Bertha, after handing me a printed translation of the service, had joined the ritual of adoration and supplication, kneeling and rising with the rest of the crowd. The church, white inside as well as out, its stained glass windows—pale blues, grays, greens and pinks—reflected the island’s summer colors. “Harbor the Homeless. Ransom the Captives. Visit the Sick. Clothe the Naked. Instruct the Ignorant. Feed the Hungry. Give Drink to the Thirsty. Bury the Dead.” The windows’ black captions admonished us in clear English under pictures of small people dressed in what seemed to be medieval costumes following those instructions. I particularly liked, “Clothe the Naked.” It seemed so immediate I imagined people carrying extra clothing whenever they went out just in case they found someone naked. Such straight forward, specific commands were strangely Puritan in a Catholic Church. There was not a single direction of the kind I was accustomed to such as, “Love thy neighbor.” At the elevation of the host, I bowed my head yet refused to pray. To do so, I thought, would only be a temporary reaction to the waves of devotion I sensed moving around me. I would not be carried away, could not bend to the church’s mysteries, or to my own needs; balkiness I recognized though I couldn’t understand it.

Studying the backs of people’s heads, I found I was searching for Luis and remembered his St. Christopher medal shining against his throat. How would he look from the back, especially if he had on a jacket? Still wishing vaguely that I might see him, I followed my aunt out of the cool church and waited for a moment with her under the arches before stepping into steamy sunshine. From the white oleanders, still wet with dew, emanated a smell I had previously associated with funeral flowers. The tall palms growing in front to the left and right of the main sidewalk, would have been a more suitable backdrop for a sheik, his robe flapping in the wind as he strode forward. New mass goers straggled indoors. Without turning I could hear the priest’s voice droning, “
In nomine Patris. …
” Across the street Aunt Bertha pointed out a huge Victorian house, the Bishop’s Palace.

Her head haloed by the stiff red poppies circling her hat, she took my arm as we strolled down the steps.

“Are you satisfied?” She asked.

“It’s a satisfactory sort of church if you want ritual, I suppose. I don’t know much about it.”

“It pleases Mowrey. This morning when you were still asleep, he went to early mass. You’re Methodist like your parents, aren’t you?”

“I’m not sure now.” I had never said that to anyone, but I kenw Bertha wasn’t going to be shocked.

“Well, we all go though a doubtful time. When I was about your age—younger really—and living in Mullin I heard about hell every Sunday. I got tired of it. Every sermon started with a “Thou shalt not.” Some of those ‘shalt nots,’ the little ones anyway, I was determined to try—to drink, dance, play cards. …” She laughed. “I didn’t know why they have to make so much of little things. And there wasn’t much choice in a tiny place like Mullin. Baptists … Methodists. … There wasn’t a Catholic in town, not one in the area. Mowrey and I got married down here. Our priest has a drink with us when he comes over.”

I wondered what Grandmother Chandler had to say about it, but Bertha only laughed and said she never talked to her about religion any more. “You can’t drag everybody along with you when you go.”

We walked on home to find Uncle Mowrey sitting on the back porch drinking coffee, the Sunday paper all around his ankles. Emmett was gone.

“Didn’t say where he was going,” Uncle Mowrey reported.

“To the beach, I guess,” Bertha said. “There isn’t much else open. Bars are closed on Sundays.”

“Ah, Bertha—” He sighed and by that slight sound, I knew he sometimes disagreed with her. At the same time, it was plain he couldn’t change her habits. It was one of those married people’s sighs. I’d heard my parents make the same sound, half-yearning, half-acknowledging.

I was surprised then when Uncle Mowrey said, “How’s the boy ever going to grow up if you and his mother know where he is all the time?”

L
uis was sitting
at about the same place where I’d seen him before. I caught sight of him from a long way off and was glad to know the name of one person in the great blank space of the beach early in the morning. He seemed to be drawing something in a sketchbook; all his attention was bent toward an object I couldn’t see. As I got closer I could watch his hand moving quickly, pausing, moving on.