(2005) Wrapped in Rain (10 page)

Somewhere about the time Matthew arrived-I can't quite remember-I was the subject of some pretty harsh ribbing at school. The teacher wanted us to stand up in front of the class and tell about our parents. I had never met my mom, and I really didn't know Rex or understand what he did or why, so I started talking about Miss Ella. The class picked up on the fact that I was talking about our "maid," and it was a couple of years before they let it die. That's really the first time I had any idea that life wasn't supposed to be what it was.

When I got home from school that day, I walked through the back screen door and dropped my books. Miss Ella saw my drooped shoulders and grabbed me by the hand. She walked me back onto the back porch where the sun was setting and casting an easy golden glow across the still-green hay. She knelt down, her white maid's shoes squeaking on Pine Sol'd floors, and she gently lifted my chin with her stubbly, callused fingers.

"Child," she whispered, "listen, and you listen close to what I say." A tear rolled down my cheek, and she brushed it with her dry and cracked thumb. "Don't you believe anybody but me."

I didn't want another sermon, so I looked away, but she jerked my head back with two fingers that smelled like peaches. "The devil is real. He's as real as water, and he's only got one thing in his sick little mind. He wants to rip your heart out, stomp on it, fill you full of venom and anger, and then pitch you into the wind like fish scales." Miss Ella was pretty good at painting pictures. "And you know what he's after?" I shook my head and started listening, because Miss Ella had a tear in her eye too. "He's after everything that's good in you. See, the Lawd ... He's the Alpha and Omega. Nothing gets past Him. Not the devil and not even Rex." I liked that, so I smiled wide. "The Lawd put me here to look out for you while you're growing up. The devil may have it for you, may be scheming until his horns are steaming, but he's going to have to get through me first."

The memory of the schoolyard was still pretty raw, but Miss Ella had soothed me. She made me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and we sat on the back porch, watching the horses feed across the back pasture. "Tucker," she said, with peanut butter wedged in the corner of her mouth, "if the devil wants to lay a hand on you, he's got to ask God's permission. He did it with job, he did it with Jesus, and he's got to do it with you. He's got to knock on the door and ask. It's been that way since he got himself kicked out of heaven."

My eyes narrowed and the question that had been on the tip of my tongue since I was old enough to think it almost came out of my mouth. She shook her head. "I know what you're thinking, but don't give it another second's thought. We're not always going to understand what God is doing or why." She placed the tip of her finger on my nose. "But one thing I know for sure. If the devil wants to touch one hair on your beautiful little head, he's got to ask permission. And you remember this-I talk to God all the time, and He told me He's not giving it."

When Miss Ella got to talking about God, there was only one right response. "Yes ma'am," I said halfheartedly.

"Boy!" She grabbed my cheeks, jerked my chin around, and lifted my face to hers. "Don't say, `Yes ma'am,' with your head." She tapped me in the chest with her stiletto finger. "Say it with your heart."

I nodded. "Yes ma'am, Miss Ella."

She let go of my cheeks and smiled with her eyes. "That's better."

When Rex hit forty-five, Mason Enterprises had holdings in every state in the Southeast, had absolutely cornered the liquor market, and Rex was anything but satisfied. At the age of fifty, he leveraged everything he owned and a few things he didn't, generated tens of millions in cash, and began buying up the competition, which he quickly dismantled and sold in small, unrecognizable pieces. With a glass in his hand and a twisted, spider-veined, and bloodflushed smile on his face, he'd tell his competitors, "Sell, or I'll start giving this stuff away and your business won't be worth a dime on the dollar." Rex had a real way with words. The gamble-and tactics-worked, because three years and another hundred million later, he was commuting from his office rooftop to Waverly Hall via helicopter and a twinturbo Cessna. If Rex had one gift, it was making money. Everything he touched turned to gold.

Back at Waverly, Rex had continued dynamiting the quarry, raping the earth. Sixty feet down, the masons blew the top off an underground spring that flooded in and filled the base of his quarry. No bother, Rex pumped the water out via a four-inch pipe to irrigate his gardens and orchards-which spanned about ten acres. Then he built a water tower next to the barn and stuck something the size of a pool on top of it where he held enough water to keep both his orchards and us alive for almost six months.

He did all this despite the fact that he knew next to nothing of houses, shotguns, thoroughbreds, servants, bird dogs, or orchards. But that didn't matter. He didn't go through all that trouble because he knew something about it or intended to. It's what others knew that drove him.

The fifteen-hundred-acre Waverly Hall tract also included a long-since vacant and dilapidated church surrounded by a graveyard. St. Joseph's had been built prior to the establishment of the Episcopal diocese in Dale, Barbour, or Henry County, so when Rex bought the property, he bought the church and graveyard by default. It contained eight pews-all wooden, narrow, and straight up and down. The place might seat forty people squeezed shoulder to shoulder. Scottish farmers had built it before 1800 when people were just grateful to have a place to sit down.

The altar was worn and looked more like a butcher's block than something sacred. A wooden Jesus hung on the back wall, topped with a crown of thorns and white, clumpy pigeon droppings on his scalp, arms, protruding knees, and toes. Rain poured in through the hole in the roof and soaked most everything, including a motheaten, purple, and squishy kneeling pad that lay beneath the railing that framed the altar. The railing wasjust big enough for about eight skinny adults to kneel briefly and then shuffle back to the comfort of their hard and upright seats where the cold rose up through the floor and penetrated their leather-soled shoes and sockless toes. Once flung wide during services to produce a summer draft, all four windows had been painted shut seventyfive years ago and had not opened since.

Rex was required by law to maintain the graveyard in "functional condition," which he did. "My man mows it once a month whether it needs it or not." From day one, the church sat dormant, doors locked, and brimming over with the most religious pigeons, spiderwebs, and rodents Alabama had ever seen. It was the closest we ever got to the inside of a real church. Thanks to the hole in the roof, the church was rotting from the inside out.

Rex had few acquaintances and absolutely no friends, but he routinely entertained business partners who could ill afford not to be nice. During the decade of his heyday, which started in his late forties, Rex employed a dozen full-time servants as well as countless business underlings who scurried like Secret Service men between Atlanta and Clopton, all adding to the perception he wished to create.

When Atlanta magazine wrote its glowing piece about the downtown mogul whose ability to build an empire from absolutely nothing would rival even King Herod," the Atlanta Journal followed it with an editorial that described him as a "squatty, fat man with beady eyes, a potbelly, and a Napoleon complex." The magazine was right. Rex did build an empire from nothing and Waverly Hall had been bought with cash, but the journal pegged him on the head because, when channeled, his combination of inferiority and insecurity, topped with an insatiable jealousy, created a ruthless tycoon who couldn't care less about the people who worked for him or the companies he dismantled.

Not to mention his two boys.

At the end of the day, when all the paperwork had been signed, hands shaken, and deals closed-including the ones under the table that netted the most money-Rex Mason had one driving motivation: obtaining control. And Waverly Hall, like Rex's life, was built in the pursuit of one thing-keeping it. Rex didn't have the slightest interest in other people liking him. All he wanted was their fear. Night and day, his single ulcer-causing concern was how to instigate fear in the competition-and everyone was competition. That included me and my brother. Others' fear gave him power-the power to control every situation he encountered. If I sound like I know what I'm talking about, I've had thirty-three years to consider it.

Rex measured himself, and everyone else, by the yardstick of control. And he only measured up when he had it. In a slight variation on Auntie Manic, Rex would stand at the dinner table, raise his glass, and tell his business partners-and newest best friends-"Life is a banquet, and most poor bitties are starving to death. Eat up!"

By the time I was six, Rex tired of Waverly Hall and his boys, so once a week became twice a month. Twice a month became month end. A year or two more and monthly became quarterly, and finally, once a quarter became hardly at all. During my eighth year of life, I saw my father one time. And in all my life, I have never celebrated a birthday or awakened on Christmas morning to anyone or anything but Miss Ella.

Having sold, built, conquered, torn down, and then torn apart, Rex turned fifty-eight and baptized himself in the three things he could not control: liquor, women, and horses. Mixed together, the resulting highball became his Waterloo. By the time I reached high school, Rex Mason woke each morning in his office in Atlanta to seven medications and downed them with eight ounces of twelveyear-old Jack Daniels. For the next ten years-having become too attracted to his own product-he existed on a liquid diet, until at seventy he met a lap dancer named Mary Victoria-the star attraction of the nightclub that leased the bottom floor of his building. She was a six-feettwo silicone beauty with an affection for shiny things. She filled his nights and his glass, and pretty soon Rex was using his cane to punch the elevator buttons at the racetrack, and Mary was covered in shine and picking all the numbers. Rex and Mary deserved each other-and both chose poorly.

By the time Rex hit seventy-five, Mary had spent most of what the IRS hadn't taken. And after more than thirty years of doctored returns, they got everything they could find. Mary moved out just after government agents hauled off Rex's files and posted an eviction notice. Rex rallied, sobered up for almost a day, dug up a few of his offshore Mason jars, which the IRS knew nothing about, and managed to keep two things: his Atlanta high-rise and Waverly Hall.

Waverly Hall may be the only wise choice he ever made. Rex had incrementally gifted his edifice to the two people who cared little for it-me and Mutt. I didn't know it until a few years ago, but by the age of ten, we owned outright everything we could see for more than two miles in any direction. It's a good thing he didn't tell us, because if he had, we'd have evicted him about two minutes later.

Since his days with the circus, Rex had controlled his consumption so that it continually produced the desired personality. When I got old enough to understand, Miss Ella told me that Rex's secret was simple-"his vigor's in his liquor." Like most demons, it caught up with him.

Now at eighty-one, Rex Mason is in the latter stages of Alzheimer's, can't count to ten, can't control the spittle that drools off his quivering bottom lip, and spends all day wrapped in an adult diaper and sitting in the crust of his own excrement in an old folks' home not far from Waverly.

Sometimes, when I think about it, it's a joyous picture.

Two MILES FARTHER EAST INTO JULINGTON CREEK, Mutt stopped paddling and let the canoe silently slip across the water. The bank grew narrow, the trees tall, and precivilized canopy covered the water. The creek had snaked back and forth for the last mile, only occasionally falling in a straight line. Water dripped off the paddle blade while Mutt listened to the owls that had sung him to sleep for seven years. Overhead, an old bird with a deep guttural drone hooted from the top of a cypress tree. Another, farther south, quickly answered like a homing beacon. The two sent sounding pings up and down the creek for nearly a minute until a third chimed in from the west and both went silent.

Mutt glided along the water, stretching the paddle through his newfound freedom yet working feverishly to quiet the voices that were raging beneath the surface. He knew Gibby would send a boat up the creek, so he began looking for an outlet. Another stream of clear water poured over a downed tree in a small waterfall as a smaller finger flowed into the creek. In comparison to the black Julington Creek, the clear water caught his attention.

Mutt pulled the canoe up over the log and paddled up the clear stream. The waterway narrowed to less than six feet across then cut along the side of a huge cypress tree. Mutt pushed the branches out of his way, even lying down in the canoe to clear the limbs, and poled himself into a clearing. He looked for the continuation of the stream but saw none. He had paddled into a cul-de-sac, and the stream had disappeared. The headwaters, apparently. Either way, he had found the source and was now spinning in a slow circle above it. He pulled the canoe onto the bank, sat in the bottom, opened his chess set on the seat before him, and aligned the pieces. He carefully opened a Ziploc bag holding a single bar of soap and dipped his hands in the spring, turning the soap over and over and over as lather bubbled in the water. When clean, he rinsed and began playing his eight competitors. Sirens and boat motors sounded in the distance, but they'd never find him. Only one person would think to look out here.

Several hours later, a green-and-orange chameleon climbed up the side of the canoe and perched atop the bow, blowing its pink chin in and out like a miniature sail that flashed in the moonlight. Buried inside the base of a vertical bank of mud that rose four feet from the surface of the water, Mutt watched the sail inflate and deflate for an hour while the lizard bobbed its head and tried to impress a suitor. When no suitor appeared, the lizard sped off the railing, launched itself off the stern, splashed in the crystal water, and swam across the spring, using its tail as a propeller. Reaching the opposite bank, it climbed up an overhanging vine and disappeared into the tree above.