Uncivil Seasons (33 page)

Cadmean beamed. “Isn’t that the prettiest thing in the world? Winter fields. I got no use for people putting down the Piedmont like it was some scruffy patch between the mountains and the beach.”

“The mountains and the coast are beautiful,” I said.

“It’s all beautiful. God on the land never went wrong. People now, I think He gave up and turned people over to Lucifer.” Cadmean pulled out another cigar while I found a last cigarette and we each lit our own, and I waited.

Finally he mumbled, “So,” his lips a circle of smoke. “Here’s the part of my story for your special satisfaction. Say, when I’m sitting down there in my boat, I see my false friends out on the inn’s porch arguing with that design man, and he looks a mite weavy on his feet from not being the kind to hold his liquor. After the others walk on back inside, he stands there looking down at something he’s pulled out of his pocket.”

The coin. So far, each thing Cadmean had said fit precisely with what Cary Bogue had long ago reported: the arguing would have been their trying to convince Ames not to take his boat across the lake after having so much to drink. It was what happened next that I wanted to know. I asked, “And?”

“And? Well,
and
this in-love fellow pops out of the inn and catches up with the other one, right about where his boat’s moored. And they talk a bit. And they yell a bit. And maybe it’s talk about this also two-timing woman they both want to hold on to. The way I said before, men are rutting hogs, and, son, that’s a fact of nature no sense denying. And this in-love fellow gets carried away with his feelings and slugs my design man right in the face a good one, and down he goes, clunk, on that hard concrete walkway by the dock. And off the other one goes not even looking back.”

My heart had quickened fast enough to sweat my hands inside their gloves. Had Rowell simply left Ames lying there on the marina walk?

“He went off to his car in the lot?” I asked.

Cadmean shrugged, puffing up smoke at the cloudless sky, watching it rise. “So, there I sit and there the other one lies flat out. I’ll tell you this. I didn’t feel like going helping that man up after he’d stabbed me in the back. But he didn’t move and didn’t move, and I’m starting to think, maybe he’s accidentally dead from that fall under the influence.

But pretend, here comes the in-love fellow back and he about jumps out of his skin when he sees the other one still laying where he’d socked him. So he picks him up. Now, son, let me rest my old voice. You use your imagination.” Cadmean’s sleepy yellow eyes moved back toward me.

I stared at him. “He put the body in the boat and took off.”

“All right. That sounds like a good ending to this story.”

I said, “And he motors out into the middle of Pine Hills Lake, throws the body overboard, jumps off himself, and swims ashore.”

Cadmean’s cigar slid around in his pink puffy lips. He shook his head. “My story ends at the dock. My eyes are good, they truly are, but not good enough to see across a big old lake in the middle of a summer night.”

“You heard the explosion when the boat hit the pump?”

“My ears are good as my eyes.”

I tried to keep my voice even. “And you never said
anything
? Why didn’t you tell Stanhope?”

Cadmean’s little, eyes widened innocently. “Tell him what?”

“Christ! That Rowell murdered Bainton Ames!”

“Now, son, now.” He leaned over and squeezed at my shoulder. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I walked off, wheeled and stared back at him. At the stable end of the muddy arena I could see the teenage boy leading out Manassas, now unsaddled and looking like some Tartar chieftain’s steed, the winter hair of his pasterns like high shaggy black fur boots. I said to Cadmean, “Fifteen years! And you know what! You
told
Rowell what you saw, didn’t you? Christ, you’ve had him by the balls for
fifteen years
?”

Pulling off his fur cap, Cadmean scratched his bald skull. “Well, that’s a mighty uncomfortable figure of speech… I’ll tell you two things about Rowell. He was a good husband to Cloris. He’s been a good state senator to this area. He’s a Piedmont man. He does what he can for us.”

“He’s
your
man.”

Cadmean squished the cap back on. “I’m a Piedmont man. So are you. I love where I live. Don’t you, son?”

I told him, “Ken Moize can subpoena you. You’ve withheld evidence in a felony.”

“Have I?” He pulled out the cigar and studied it curiously. “Have I? I thought I was just telling you a story. In exchange for you arranging a visit. And seems like you gave me your word you’d get Baby to come see me. So why don’t you go do it, son?”

“You’re amazing! You stand there and tell me you’d commit
perjury
, and then you expect me to ‘keep my word’!”

He looked at me with an astonishing benign affection. “Justin. I don’t believe you think a gentleman’s word has anything to do with what other people do or don’t do, or say or don’t say. Keeping his word just has to do with his having given his word. Am I right? That’s the kind of gentleman I want to see my girl bed down with.”

By now I was pacing back and forth about twenty feet off from him. I yelled, “Just what are you going to do if Hudson and Willis won’t keep their mouths shut! If you sent them over to Cloris’s, and we can tie you to it, you better believe that’s a subpoena you’ll
have
to answer. Christ!”

Cadmean spit out his cigar and ground it into the mud. “Oh, now we’re back to your story. Well, I don’t believe I’ll worry about that. I’m an old man, and worrying’s bad for the little bit left of my health. Like I said, son, this philosophizing of yours about brute violence and all getting on the loose, and how it can’t be controlled…It all depends.” And then with a jerky quickness I wouldn’t have thought possible, he jumped down from the hay bale, threw up both arms, clapped his hands sharply, and in a booming shout called, “Manassas!
Huh! Huh! Huh!
”

Off at the field’s end, the black stallion broke loose from the startled stableboy, reared with a shivering whinny, then bolted toward us. Duchess bounded to her feet and started barking.

Mud flew up with a smacking pop as Manassas’ hooves slapped at the ground, flying closer. He was galloping straight toward me, his neck stretched, mane shaking, nostrils huffing out white smoky air. His eyes wild on mine, he kept coming almost as if old Cadmean, like a wizard, had communicated to him some silent command that he come trample me to death. At the last instant, when I could feel his breath in the air, I leapt sideways to the barrier of the hay bale.

Cadmean stood right where he was, as serenely as if he watched a child skip toward him bringing flowers. Only inches away from crashing into the fat old man, the horse sheered off at an angle, legs prancing mud up on Cadmean’s pant legs, then whirled around and stopped himself in front of his master, who reached calmly in the deep pocket, pulled out the jelly beans, and held them up. Manassas mouthed them out of the big, twisted fingers while Cadmean, cooing, rubbed the sweated neck. “Good boy,” said the old man with a chuckle, and peered over at me. “Controlling brutes, now, son. It all depends,” he said quietly, “on who’s in control. Huh?” He thrust his fingers through the bridle strap and tugged the nuzzling animal into a walk beside him back across the thawing field.

•   •   •

Two hours later, when I came quietly into the crematorium of Pauley and Keene Funeral Home, Mr. Cadmean, in a dark suit, his bald head bowed, stood alone among the empty chairs as the Reverend Thomas Campbell, who had baptized generations of the inner circle, including mine, prayed that in heaven Joanna Cadmean’s soul would find the peace that life should not promise and cannot give; while Mr. Pauley with a discreet forefinger pushed the button that slid her rich, black coffin smoothly and slowly into the fiery furnace.

Afterward, I walked Mr. Cadmean out to his limousine and said I’d like to ask him one question. “Did you ever tell Joanna the story you told me?”

“What story was that, son?”

“The one about the designing man and the in-love fellow.”

His driver opened the back door to the C&W company limousine. Cadmean carefully lowered himself into the plush seat, then shook his head. “I don’t recall that particular story,” he said. “But I never told Joanna any love stories. I truly never had the feeling she was the kind of woman would want to hear them. Would you excuse me now? I need to get back to my mills. I’ve got a young snot been giving me a hard time. He’s in for a surprise. I’m an old man. But I’m not as old as they think. Huh? I appreciate you paying Joanna your respects. I like a man with good manners. Principles, I’ve got no use for. Ever notice how most of the slime of the world gets flung there by men with principles? Take care, now.” The big car turned slowly toward home. Home was Hillston. All of it.

“General, I had made plans to fling my skinny body over what you might call the chasm between Junior Briggs and her old man Fatso the Bald because I hate to see a family frost each other when it’s a family I want to put my name to, and I’m the one liable to end up catching the icy breeze. But I don’t know about talking Briggs into going over there. All this terrible stuff you tell me that old rascal’s said, not to mention
done
, lordy! I don’t know. Why did you say we can’t go to Moize? My future pa-in-law ought to be in jail!”

I said, “Cadmean does love her, Cuddy. It’s been five years since Briggs’s even gone to his house.”

“Well, now, love. Nero loved Rome. To hear him tell it, he only burnt it down so he could redo it prettier. I saw that on TV.”

“Don’t worry. I didn’t think you’d been sneaking around reading Suetonius.”

“Who?”

Cuddy Mangum roamed my kitchen drinking my beer and complaining to Mrs. Mitchell about the contents of my refrigerator and shelves. “Honey, just eat it. I know it looks all crumbly and rotted, but he doesn’t have any
American
cheese. What kind of soups are these tall skinny cans supposed to be? Bisque? Vissysuave? Don’t you have any meatball vegetable?”

We were there waiting for a visitor. Mr. Ratcher Phelps had telephoned shortly after my return from the funeral services to say he was ready to pay his call. I confessed I wasn’t going to be able to hand him a check for $5,000 today. In his sonorous dirge of a voice, he replied, “Patience is a woman I’ve kept company with all my life, and I’ve got the trusting heart that gives a man tranquillity of mind.”

We were waiting and Mr. Phelps was an hour late.

“Maybe,” said Cuddy, gnawing at an old stale loaf of French bread, “maybe Parson Phelps and his girlfriend Patience took time off to go at it back behind the pianos.” And he gave his crotch-pumping gesture.

I shook my head. “Mangum, I thought love was going to refine you.”

“You never know what love’s gonna do. Look what it’s done for you: losing your job, punching husbands out, you and Red running wild and slobby in the streets. Is this bread bread, or is it bricks?” Teeth clenched on one end of the loaf, he was yanking wildly at the other with both hands.

“It’s old.”

“Of course it’s old. It’s yours, isn’t it? I think it’s got two of my teeth in it, too.” He gave up and let the loaf clatter to the table. “Anyhow, what you don’t know is, one reason Professor Briggs Junior is so crazy about me is because I’m so, let’s call it, loose. How’s that?
Loose
.” He jiggled all his lanky limbs in an attempt to convey a languid, easygoingness. “And she’s uptight. I mean, not really uptight from the inside out, but a little bit from the outside in. Due to her losing her ma and hating her pa—wonder why?—and due to that phony-leftist ghoul she slipped up and married up North. That creep actually
beat
her, on his way to a Hooray Hanoi march, and if I ever come across him I’m gonna be tempted to do to him what a guy from Hanoi did to a friend of mine. Oh, lord, you know: we all plum lost our innocence to the sixties. I oughta be ten years younger. Know what I mean? 1965 to ’75, Uncle Sam was an old acidhead. Good politics, though.”

I sat down across from him with my yogurt and said, without planning to, what I never had said in five years of almost daily conversation. “Cuddy. I want to tell you something, all right?”

“Shoot.”

“You say you lost a decade. Well, so did I. I was in a sanitarium. Twice. A hospital up in the Blue Ridge.” His jay eyes looked into mine, warm in the sun coming across my shoulder onto the table’s clutter of food. “They called it ‘acute alcoholism.’ But it wasn’t just drink. I was, well, okay, I was pretty crazy.” Blushing, I rubbed hard at my ear. “It’s not the sort of thing I want people to know. But I’ve told Alice and I’ve always felt bad not being open with you about it. So…well, that’s it.”

The sun moved in among the bony shadows of his face. “Aww, General,” he said quietly. “I’m glad you said so.” Then he smiled. “But I’ve known it for years.”

“Known what?”

He rolled his blue eyes extravagantly. “That you’d gone to the bin, as my grandma used to say when they took her spinster sister there for being too much of a friend of Jesus—even though the hymn says you’re supposed to be. But she fell into the habit of too-long nightly phone talks to Him, and they were on a party line.”

I was rattled. “Don’t kid me. You knew?”

“’Course I knew. So what? I told you, everybody went crazy back then. You should have seen me out in those rice paddies.” He grimaced. “No. I take it back. You shouldn’t have seen me.”

“That’s different.”

“Not much.”

“You didn’t bring it on yourself.”

“I brought my first wife on myself trying to get out of going.”

I found him another beer in the back of the refrigerator. “Who told you?”

“Guess.” He snapped off the can top. “Right. Old V.D. Fulcher wanted me to keep an eye out, let him know if you slipped up.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?!”

His Adam’s apple bobbled as he drank. “Never saw you slip up.”

I pushed the yogurt away. “Rowell must have told Fulcher.”

“Probably.” Cuddy squatted down by the cabinets. “So, I wasn’t open with you either. And another thing I never told, I’ll tell you now it’s true confessions. Your old love Lunchbreak made a play for me about a year ago. That time I came to that cast party y’all had when you did, what was it?
The Philadelphia Story
. She was high and wanted to know if I wanted to step into a back room and get that way too.” He had his head in the cabinet, looking among the cans there.