Cementville (12 page)

Her father keened and crashed and grieved like a crazy person for his dead wife. Came the day he placed his twin girls, Giang and Suong, on a riverboat. He told them to wait, he would return with tea and food. But he did not come back. The riverboat carried them away, down to the city, to the five black years.

When she thinks of the brothel, she sees a pair of matching strung playthings in the vague shapes of herself and her sister. Tangled puppets, dancing to the rigged fate of a fickle and careless god, collapsing into each other's arms, sleeping through whole days.

She wonders whether her husband is right. Would she be less sad if she let the poems go? Simply toss all three of the little cloth-bound books—one for each year she has been in this place—into the Papa Bear wood stove? They could curl up the chimney with the smoke of the rotted crabapple Jimmy split and stacked into a neat rick last August.

She should listen to him. He had saved her, after all.

I
WANT TO DANCE WITH
my wife
, Jimmy says, breaking the spell. He has been teaching Giang the contra dances in anticipation of the big annual barn dance. He won't hear her protests that it's too early for dancing. He lets the diamond needle down on the record player and he spins toward her across the wooden floor of the living room.

Twirling in her husband's arms, Giang tries to dislodge from her mind the specter of Suong floating away from her. Watching her sister plunge into the filthy river below their Saigon bedroom that night, Giang had dug her nails into the windowsill.

She thought she had swallowed for good that old companion, despair. But closing her eyes and resting her chin on Jimmy's shoulder now, her twin is forever falling from the window, her arms cartwheeling, her black eyes sparkling in the muddy current.

Suong had yelled to Giang three times,
jump!
before the river carried her away.

Jimmy and Giang Smith make a lovely pair, the townspeople will say, the china doll in the arms of a burly farm boy, wheeling around the room to the Spanish Waltz.

* * *

“H
ARLEY, GET UP!
G
ET UP
, Mr. Harlan Wilder O'Brien! There's the fences want mending, and holes in the roof that want stoppering from the rain, and there's the barn dance, Harley, the barn dance coming soon, where Analisa Frasier wants dancing, dancing by the light of the moooon.”

Lieutenant Harlan O'Brien lying board straight on the wood floor, under a storm-strewn sky, under his father's roof, under his mother's wedding quilt, tries to recall: Is he a good son? The son who mends fence and roof and who mows and gathers hay into great round bales? The woman singing at him up the stairwell, a crazed meadowlark, seems to think so.

His mother's laugh sprinkles the air with birdsong and confectioners' sugar. She tousles the head of her boy on whom the sun has cast the brilliant light of bravery—or would as soon as the sun cleaves the black-clouded sky. She shoves at her sweet stranger the plate of turnovers she has made for him.

She is anxious to show him off again.

After breakfast, he works alongside his silent sentinel of a father, the older man's stride certain, the younger's half-pained, stretching new wire across the breaches where bawling animals have scratched
their massive sides, mashing down the fence. The two men work through a persistent drizzle until finally a wan sun rolls up the storm sky like a window blind. The two do not speak, but walk toward the house and the smell of lunch rolls. The roof will not dry enough to mend this day.

The noon meal would be a silent affair but for the meadow-lark voice of his mother. “Analisa, Analisa,” she keeps saying, “you remember Analisa, Molly and Leonard's girl a few years behind you in school? She'll be calling you directly. Everybody's saying she has her hopes pinned on you.” The annual barn dance, to which the girls invite the boys, is this weekend, a vaguely pagan festival ushering in the summer.

The men stare into their Dutch blue dinner plates, gradually revealing the windmill design in the center by scooping up the navy beans with hunks of lunch rolls, light and flaky, washing it all down with buttermilk.

SIX

W
hen the Duvall Funeral Home got a window in its schedule, Malcolm Duvall drove his hearse to the county morgue to pick up the body of Daniel Ferguson. Arlene Ferguson was still a mess, and it seemed urgent to her that someone from the family accompany the boy, whose embalmed body had been kept iced, so to speak, in the hospital basement for ten days. It fell to Byard to ride along with Mac Duvall. Levon was unreachable, and who else was there? Not their no-account grandfather. Nobody could remember when Angus Ferguson had last drawn a sober breath.

“I feel bad this took so long for us to get to, Byard. You understand, with the sheer number of funerals here lately, something had to be put on hold.” The mortician kept his eyes on the road as he spoke. He was a rather wooden man, something Byard reckoned was the result of all his years managing other people's grief. “And Reverend Aiken agreed to the delay. I had no idea he hadn't conferred with your mother.”

Aiken was the traveling Presbyterian minister who passed through town once a month or so and preached to the few of his
flock that called the predominantly Catholic Cementville home. Byard was not about to give Duvall the satisfaction of an answer, even though he did understand perfectly—he understood that his clan, his kind, would always be the ones at the bottom of any list. He also understood that the undertaker was trying to apologize. Leaving the hospital, the long black car rolled almost soundlessly through town, cut down the alley, and pulled in behind the funeral home.

Roddy Duvall came out to help his father unload the gurney from the back of the hearse. Byard remembered him as a sweetnatured kid who was chummy with Daniel. Roddy and Daniel had been in special ed together at the county high school. Roddy appeared to recognize Byard too, and he dipped his head in a respectful nod and mumbled something Byard couldn't catch. Evidently Roddy's draft deferment for low IQ, unlike Daniel's, had gone through without a hitch. The mortician and his son rolled the gurney across the loading pad, and Byard followed them through the funeral home's back door.

“We'll take good care of him,” Mac Duvall said. He stuck a hand out to Byard. “You can bring your mama over about four this afternoon. We'll have time for a private family viewing before the wake starts at seven this evening.”

As if anybody other than family is going to care about coming to see Daniel off, Byard thought, knowing he oughtn't. The undertaker was trying to be kind, and little kindnesses warranted acknowledgment. Byard was pretty sure the price Malcolm Duvall quoted them for the entire funeral service and burial arrangement was half the usual cost.

“We appreciate it,” Byard said. “Everything.” He shook Duvall's hand and reached for Roddy's, and the boy seemed surprised. “Daniel always liked you, Roddy.”

“Daniel was my friend,” Roddy slurred. He was more profoundly retarded than Byard had known, and Byard was ashamed for his close-heartedness of a moment ago.

He headed out on foot toward Rafe and Martha Goins's house. He and MaLou had moved into the empty bedroom where Donald
Raphael Goins III had slept for all of his twenty-four years, until he left for training at Fort Hood, Texas. Martha claimed that MaLou and Byard staying with them would help her and Rafe move on, that the house felt too empty. Rafe had kept silent on the matter, as seemed to be his way about anything having to do with his son's death. Byard intended it to be a temporary arrangement. He and MaLou would get a place together, something cheap, save enough money to get out of here. He was prepared to go back to Canada, and MaLou, amazingly, seemed ready to follow him.

It was still a mystery to Byard that MaLou had wanted to stay here at all. That she made him stand there in her Aunt Martha's kitchen while she called the newspaper in Cincinnati and informed them she wasn't coming back to work. That she rode with him over to Travelers Grove and, in the living room of the Justice of the Peace, in the dress she'd worn to her cousin Donnie's funeral, said she would have and hold him—
him
, Byard—all the days of her life, while Martha and Rafe stood witness.

What had gotten into the girl? Into him, for that matter? He had come back to Cementville against all common sense. Selective Service would catch up with him sooner or later. He was as good as a criminal already. But he couldn't have stayed away, not when his mother needed him. Not when his little sister Augrey was becoming more of a hellion—okay, a tramp—and more unreachable. Bile rose in his throat, thinking about it.

God he was thirsty.

He reversed course and headed upriver toward Pekkar's Alley, knowing it was a bad idea. He'd managed to avoid the place since he and MaLou had gone together to raise a glass with most of the town after the Memorial Day parade and the judge's bizarre speech. They'd both needed a drink then. But the place gave MaLou the heebie jeebies—or rather, Levon's presence there gave her the heebie jeebies—and they hadn't stayed long.

Byard stepped into the bar's dim interior, his eyes watering a moment against the stench of soured grease. He slid into an empty
booth. He didn't recognize the girl who took his order. Five years was all it took to lose track of a place. Was she Happy Spalding's girl? She had that round face, the big surprised eyes.

“What you got on draft?” Byard asked.

She told him. “You want anything to eat with that or you doing liquid lunch today?”

Byard looked at the wall clock and saw that it was already twelve thirty. “Pekkar Burgers still as bad as I remember them?”

“If you order extra onions, we'll throw in the heartburn for free.” She said it with a flat voice, as if she'd been trained to make banter with the customers and had used the line a hundred times too many.

“Aren't you one of the Spalding girls?” Byard said. She moved her head slightly in what passed for affirmation. “Why did Hap let you come over here and work for Roger Pekkar? Seems Happy's joint is pretty hopping these days.”

“Wasn't a matter of
letting
me,” the girl said. “I do what I want.”

“Hey, don't get all het up. I'm all for women's lib.” Byard grinned, but it did little to warm her up. “I'll have the burger, hold the onions. Fries. Forget the beer. I'll take a shake. Chocolate.” He was already thinking of kissing MaLou, and he didn't want her tasting onions or beer on his breath.

“One Pekkar Platter Deluxe and a shake,” she said and vanished into the kitchen.

Ever since they'd come into Pekkar's last weekend, when MaLou had seen Levon drunk—and a good portion of the other men in town fall-down drunk too—she had been after Byard, just slightly, but after him in a way that made him uncomfortable. Byard had shared highballs with Rafe one evening and MaLou wasn't happy about it. And Levon had come by the next afternoon to ask Byard if he wanted to pick up a little part-time work with him, and MaLou nixed the idea. They'd had their first fight after that, and he had come right out with it: Did she think he was some kind of alkie? That he was a loser too, just like Levon, just like his grandfather Angus, just like every
other goddamn Ferguson? He hadn't meant to yell, but there it was. The generational self-loathing that seemed to be a third corpuscle in Ferguson blood.

They had made up, of course. MaLou curled herself around him that night and they made love in Donnie Ray Goins's bed and she was as tender with him as anybody had ever been in his life. He lay in the dark later and wondered if it was time to stop thinking of himself as an unlucky man.

“You are a good man,” she had said out of nowhere, as if some gentle spirit had been listening to his thoughts and chose to speak through her.

Now Byard doubted the magic of it, and he played his wife's words over and over, trying to remember where the emphasis had been placed. You are a
good
man. You
are
a good man. As in, she would talk herself into it. As in, no matter what people say, she believed in him. As in, she would argue for his decency, and perhaps would continue trying to convince herself, even after all the evidence was in and he had proven himself otherwise.

He waited for the Spalding girl to bring out a plate of food that would sit heavy on his gut the rest of the day. Waiting, he tried to imagine MaLou learning what is really inside him, the kinds of things he is capable of. Could she insist on his goodness then, once she knew the worst of the things he had done? Years had passed since that awful night, years that he had hoped were enough to create real distance. But what constituted enough time? Eight years, nine? Could the young man he'd once been—weak, corruptible, barely the agent of his own life—could he have been replaced by the good man MaLou believed in now? The Canadian doctor had pinned that night, nine years ago, as perhaps the start of Byard's “fugue state.” The beginning of his wandering, if not of his secrets.