Uncivil Seasons (37 page)

“Good evening, General Lee. Now, you scared us bad last night, slipping away again. Pull yourself together. Bubba Percy down at
The Star
got halfway through your obituary, had you joining all your fancy ancestors up in Preppie Heaven. But I told him, ‘Bubba, you rot-eating hyena, that man’s not about to die. He’s got a closet full of clothes he’s never even worn. Plus he owes me $69.50 for jumping on top of me and bleeding all over my JC Penney parka.

“Speaking of owing money, we got a
bill
here from Mr. Ratcher Phelps. He wants the city to reimburse him for the $233 in cash he claims he was carrying in the wallet he claims was removed from his person by those two old drunks in the alley. Says I, ‘My, my, you mean right there in the middle of the guns of Navarone, which you might have thought would scare off such jittery tiny little rummies as those two, you mean those two eensy-weensy winos whipped around from where I saw them scrabbling away, and coolly relieved you of that much untraceable money?’ Says Phelps back, ‘Young sir, Greed knows not Fear, and an inebrious man has no ears, and it is devastatabalistical to me that when the white people get robbed, you people come running, but when the black people get robbed—yea, in the very midst of laying down their lives for the white people—that’s when you people turn your backs, and perambulate the other way.’

“Well, he had me there. Says I, ‘Parson Phelps, think of nephew Billy, out of jail and back on the streets up to his childish pastimes. And doesn’t a citation of gratitude from the mayor of Hillston himself mean more to you than filthy lucre?’ Know what he said? He said, ‘No.’ Now, who’d suspect he could talk so short? So, I get him the money, don’t ask where from, but Hiram Davies would go rabid and chew up his desk. So now Phelps says, ‘Here’s the rest of it’ The ‘rest’ meaning a bill for, one, dry-cleaning his coat; two, replacing his fedora; and three, outpatient services to paint Mercurochrome on his noggin. Meanwhile, Savile,
you
owe Phelps seventy-five dollars a month for the rest of your life, which needs to be a
real
long one.

“What for? Why, the new piano installed in your living room you gave him that eight-hundred-dollar down payment on. He threw in the stool ’cause he took a fancy to you.”

•   •   •

“Well, my my! They took those coils out of your nostrils. Tell you the truth, they didn’t do a thing for your looks. ’Course, you still look a little too much like the creature from the black lagoon, what with all your hair gone under that wrapping, and I’m really not all that crazy about your scruffy beard. But on the other hand—now don’t rile up, Peggy Savile—ma’am, you do have yourself a handsome son somewhere underneath it all. Now if he’ll just go back to sleep and stop pestering us with all this begging for sips of water, maybe we can play us some more bridge before they throw us out. Is that Ms. Woods, R.N., on again? Umm ummm, she was so short-tempered to my little poodle last night. Where’d Junior and Alice go? I swear, sometimes I get the feeling those girls aren’t really trying all that hard to learn how to play this game, Peggy. Do you get that feeling? Lordy, they already owe us four hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and they’re still trumping their own aces. Can I offer you a glazed doughnut, ma’am? I see you’re watching the basketball game. A blue-through Tarheel, you sweet lady!”

•   •   •

And days of nights passed by. And not until then was I told how long the timeless while had lasted. Not until then was I told that outside the sealed window of my hospital room, everywhere on the trees along the branches swollen buds had burst to petals, unleafing snow and rose.

They said it was the third week of March. It might as easily have been in my dreaming one night or one year since I’d felt myself fall back into the sheen of that blue parka, but by the moon’s time, a few days more than two months had circled round, passing by. Two months that would have no past. I thought how less than a twinkling of an eye must time be to the dead.

They told me I had been unconscious for three weeks, and only semiconscious for three more. They told me that two doctors had given me up, and a third had flown into Hillston from Baltimore, and contradicted them, and snapping off his surgical gloves had flown back away. They told me that I was lucky, and that I would be living from now on with a shorter intestine, a stiffer right leg, and a head made harder by a small plate of steel. They waited no longer to tell me that Earth had turned tumbling on without my knowing, slanting the Piedmont to spring, because doctors were going to cut away my bandages to see if I could see, and everyone was concerned that for me to see the world so changed since last I saw it would bring about a relapse.

But what I saw after the chilling blade snipped, and weight lifted gauze by gauze, was light brightening until it hurt, and then the white and rose Highlander face of Alice MacLeod. And that hadn’t changed at all.

“Hi,” she whispered. “I was saying when you hung up: I love you.”

After a few minutes, another face leaned down and winked a blue jay eye. “Let’s move on out of the mush, you two,” said Cuddy. “I’ve got an official ceremony to perform. This is business.” He waited until the warm, limpid eyes of the doctor from India finished searching in mine, finished touching my face with the same long, thin, careful fingers I had seen months ago feel for Rowell Dollard’s pulse. Then Cuddy said, “Here goes. Now watch me mess up.
Dulce et decorum est pro frate
just about
mori
.”

In his hands was yellow shine that unfolded into a long, fringed, yellow sash. With studious pats he draped it across my hospital shirt. “I memorized that,” he said. “You want me to tell you what it means? ‘How sweet it is to throw your body down for your soul brother.’ More or less. Doctor Dunk-it was my consultant. Don’t you just love it? It’s old. That sash is old, too. That sash is a genuine Confederate sash I bought in Washington, D.C. This auction agent that found the coin for poor old Joanna Cadmean helped me locate this sash. I told him you were dying and I wanted you to be buried in it.”

“I don’t know why in the world,” said my mother to Alice MacLeod, “men think
women
are so sentimental.”

“But, General, even though you fooled me, you can keep it anyhow if you want to.”

“Why, my God, Alice, I remember how Justin and his father both cried all the way through
Bambi
.”

“Oh, didn’t that movie just break your heart?” sniffed Cuddy. “But now,
Dumbo
was even sadder than that. Did y’all see
Dumbo
? Remember when they chained up his momma? Oh, my!” Cuddy blew his nose, yanking a Kleenex out of the box beside Mother’s Shut-in Surprise.

The next week I was put in a wheelchair by the window so that I could watch the Lenten sky blossoming, and the cardinals swaying on the thin branches of the dogwood trees. Seated there, by the window, my thoughts were often with Rowell.

The state had made its decision. At a new inquest, Hillston’s coroner had ruled Joanna Cadmean’s death an apparent suicide. Probably no one would ever know if she had really spotted the original Liberty-head coin in the case. Perhaps she had seen it, but I preferred to believe that Joanna had never seen the coin Rowell confessed he had picked up from the marina pavement and, years later, returned to the case. And returned there as a token of what? Possession? Guilt? Cancellation of the killing itself, itself tangible evidence that Bainton Ames had never removed the coin from the case that night, and so had never left his house that night, and so had never drowned?

If Joanna Cadmean had
not
seen the Liberty-head coin, but had only dreamt it, then her final case for the Hillston police department transcended all the other mysteries the department had brought, in earlier years, before the oracle of her extraordinary gift. If she had only dreamt it, she was (as Rowell told me) preternatural; and I think she was.

And, ironically, if Joanna had only trusted her gift, had she not assumed she would need “real” threads to weave her spell, had she not found—as we now knew—a duplicate coin in Washington, and bought a diary in a St. Simons shop, and used the brass letter opener to break off the door chain inside Briggs’s tower study (leaving on the brass blade some fragments of the chain’s metallic paint for Etham Foster’s microscope to find), had she not erred in the other infinitesimal, inevitable ways people in the tangle of the real world must err, no doubt we would have all gone on believers. No doubt Ken Moize would have persuaded a jury to condemn Rowell Dollard for killing her, killing her, though, in only thirty seconds and not for the thirty years she believed he had actually taken to murder her heart.

But as it was, Ken Moize accepted the coroner’s new verdict that a mentally unbalanced woman had killed herself. Moize still did go to the grand jury about Rowell Dollard. And he did obtain an indictment. Because Rowell voluntarily confessed. After long discourse with our attorney general and with the other men who live at the capitol of the state, Moize agreed to accept the plea of nolo contendere then entered by Dollard’s lawyers. The charge agreed upon was involuntary manslaughter, resulting in the death of one Bainton William Ames. The judge, who was not Judge Henry Tiggs, found Rowell guilty, sentenced him to two years in prison, reduced the sentence to one year, then made him eligible for parole in six months, and then allowed whatever time the Senator needed to recover from what proved to be a paralysis of his right arm caused by his embolism to be counted toward his serving out his sentence.

Rowell would be paroled before he ever entered a cell. And if this did not seem just (as it did not to some local journalists), the judge announced in his summation that, in view of Rowell Dollard’s personal suffering and his public service (“And,” said Cuddy, “let’s face it, his family name.”), the court was inclined to be merciful. Naturally, Dollard had resigned his state senate seat and his candidacy in the upcoming primary, and our state, said the judge, could be assured that this man was thus punished well enough to satisfy justice.

They told me that before his transfer to the new state medical facilities in Raleigh, Rowell Dollard and I had lived for two weeks on the same hospital floor along the same corridor, and that often in the long nights after visitors from the world outside were required to leave my room, he had came in his wheelchair to wait beside me, never speaking, just waiting there, beside the sealed window, watching out.

•   •   •

One bright day when haze motes spun up in my room like seafoam, Cuddy Mangum stuck his head in the door. “You decent?” Then he ushered in a thick cluster of Popes, all noisily hushed and stiffly dancing so as not to take up too much space.

Dickey had his comb and his pliers in a new aquamarine cowboy shirt yoked with lariats. Graham had taken off his down vest and put on ten pounds. Somewhere lost behind Graham, Preston moved furtively. And on either side of Cuddy stood Paula Burgwin, in a muumuu, and Charlene, whom I’d last seen as a platinum blonde and who was now staggeringly black-haired and appeared to be wearing a Puerto Rican costume from
West
Side Story
. Of Charlene’s own recent stay in this hospital, there was only a thin white scar over the bridge of her nose.

The Popes jostled for position until Cuddy, like the nervous director of a school play, prodded Paula forward, and she—obviously elected speaker for the group—said, “Mr. Savile, how’re you doing?”

“Call me Justin. And much better, thank you, Paula, and how about you?”

“Well, I am trying to lose weight, is all, if you can believe that, and I’m on this Scarsdale Diet thing, you know the one where that lady shot him, and,” she giggled, “it’s a real good diet for me because I can’t even afford half the things he expects you to—”

Graham bellowed, “God damn it, Paula, will you get on with it?”

“Yeah, Paula,” said Dickey from the mirror over the sink where he was combing his hair. “Will you stop running your mouth?”

“Shut up, Dickey.” Graham cuffed his brother in the side of the head.

“Listen, y’all goons,” Paula said, “Justin
asked
me how I was doing. I’m doing fine.” She turned to me with the Snow White smile that showed her small, perfect teeth. “Well, I lost my position at the Rib House, but I’m seeking other employment at this time.”

“I don’t know why,” growled Graham.

“Anyhow,” Paula told me, “if they’d let me get a chance to say so, we all just wanted to come see how you were doing and tell you we’re sorry about your getting hurt and we appreciate what you did to help Preston out. And Charlene got a suspended sentence, for giving evidence against that goon Luster. We appreciate that. And, well, that’s all.”

Preston sidled out from behind Graham and nodded and ducked back.

I said, “Listen, I appreciate what
you
did, Graham. I probably wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.”

“Hell with it,” Graham grumbled. “I’m just sorry Hudson’s dead. I wanted to mess that son of a bitch up in person, and I wanted him to remember who was doing it.”

Charlene had stuck a cigarette between her magenta lips, but Cuddy pulled it out before she could light it. She stepped forward now, orange skirt flouncing, and frowned at the ceiling. “This is all my fault, I guess. I hope you ain’t going to hold it against me.” She stepped back as if she’d finished a recitation.

I told her, “Don’t be silly, Charlene.”

Cuddy sighed. “Let’s say there’s nobody here without some M&M’s melted on their hands; by which I mean Messing Up and Mixed Motives.”

“Not Paula.” Graham tried to hug her, but the muumuu slid away from him. “This little angel of a mother here never badmouthed a soul in her life.”

Paula giggled. “I guess you never heard some of the things I’ve said about you, Graham.”

“She was teasing,” he explained. “Okay, lieutenant, you ever want to go hunting something with
four
legs, you look me up. We got to hit the road, I guess.”

“We got to split,” echoed Dickey, and they all left but Preston, who passed quickly by my bed, his hand inside his leather jacket, and dropped out of it a car’s AM/FM tuner onto my sheet, then hurried away after his family.