Authors: Lisa Howorth
“They hope,” he said. “Even when they know, they hope.”
“What about Tuttle? He’s been blamed all these years.”
Stith nodded. “I’m going to try to locate him and set that straight.”
No telling how Tuttle’s life had been fucked up. Mary Byrd shook her head, stepping on her cigarette butt, then picked it up and put it in her pocket. “Well, we all thank you very much, even if we seemed to be hating your guts.”
Stith smiled. “When we no longer need the little truck, would you like to have it?
“Oh. Yes, sure.” She wasn’t at all sure.
“I just offered to send it to your mom or brothers, but they didn’t want it; they said you might because you have a little boy. And your mother said, ‘Yes, she’ll want it. She’s a
terrible hoarder
.’”
“Guilty,” Mary Byrd said. “I like little things.” She felt tears. “My son might like it, but he’s more into tanks and planes. But thanks. I would really like to have it. And I’ll send you that photograph of it as soon as I get home.”
“There’s something else.” Stith drew something from his pocket. “They’re yours.”
He handed her a small green book with gold edges, and an envelope.
“Oh, jeez,” she said, recognizing her ancient, pitiful diary. Embarrassed, she could only think to say, “Thank you.”
“I don’t know why they were never returned,” Stith said. “Or why they were asked for. They were never needed.”
Seeing the old envelope addressed to her in Tuttle’s boyish scrawl, she said, “I don’t think I want this.”
“It’s yours to destroy.”
“They told me . . . Did they ever even really think that Ned Tuttle had killed Stevie to get back at me?”
Stith looked puzzled. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“That’s what a detective told me. That’s why they took the diary.” She wondered if Stith had read it.
“Are you sure you’re remembering that right?” Stith asked. “Sometimes, when people are so traumatized . . .”
“I’ve been remembering it correctly for thirty years. It’s not something a girl would forget.” Eliza would kill anyone who looked at her diary.
Stith put his hands in his pockets and looked down. “I would let that go. I’m just glad you have your things back.”
He raised his head and looked her in the eye, honest and stern, like a dad. Or a shrink.
Mary Byrd made up her mind to do what he said. It was time.
They shook hands. She noticed his nice wrists. What was wrong with her? Stith said he would stay in touch until it was over. Mary Byrd ran to catch up with her family, who she knew would be fuming in the car, pissed off at her for keeping them waiting, her big, middle-age brothers crammed and doubled up in the backseat, her pipsqueak mom at the wheel, insisting on driving in spite of the gouty tophus, taking the lives she’d given them back in her bony little hands.
Evagreen sat on her porch in the weak winter sun, smoking a Salem. They were burying Rod; she hadn’t gone. She couldn’t, although L. Q. and Ken had. She’d used the excuse that somebody had to stay back with Desia. Desia, Angie’s girl, sat on a blanket on the walk playing, having given up trying to ride the plastic Big Wheel Ken had brought her. L. Q. and Ken had cleared most of the fallen branches, but the trees dripped a little from melting ice.
Evagreen had plaited Desia’s soft hair with pink beads and a few yellow jessamine blossoms that, being so close to the house, had survived the storm. The tiny girl looked so much like her father, something that Evagreen knew would haunt them all forever. Girls look like they daddies, she’d heard somewhere, so their daddies don’t turn on them. Eliza Thornton look just like her daddy, too, thought Evagreen, so maybe that true. Maybe so.
Desia was trying to arrange some sticks, oak leaves, and an empty Salem pack to make a little house, managing a sort of hut. From a pile of old chinaberries that had blown down during the storm, she took three. “This the mama and the daddy,” she said. “My mama and daddy gone love to see this, Granmama.” She looked up at Evagreen and grinned.
Evagreen smiled back. They hadn’t told Desia yet. What you gone tell a four-year-old? she’d said to L. Q. and Ken. She just like me. All she want in this life is a nice home, a family that act right, be good to one another. They had let it drop for the time being. Evagreen hoped Desia hadn’t seen much of the ugliness between her parents. Whatever happened with Angie, she and L. Q. and Rod’s folks were going to make a happy home for Desia right here.
Ken and L. Q. had taken Evagreen to see Angie in Memphis. All Angie could do was cry, cry, cry. Evagreen hadn’t even been able to hold her; had to stay across the table in the visiting room. And she’d had to be strong; she’d told herself; wouldn’t help nobody, all of us be crying. L. Q. had prayed, and Ken had promised he would work things out the best he could. They could count on that, he’d said. The guards had led Angie away, and all she had been able to say was, “I’m sorry, Mama.” That moment, taking her good baby girl away, had hurt Evagreen more than anything. She thought it might have hurt less if Angie had died. “Hope and strength what I’m lookin’ for,” she said out loud. “That, and some a that mercy they always be talking ’bout.”
Desia looked up at her solemnly, and with a big breath, like she was blowing out candles on a birthday cake, blew at her stick-and-leaf house. “I huffed and I puffed and I blowed our house down!” she said. The sticks fell apart and the three chinaberries rolled away in different directions.
They were a little late to Ernest’s church, although the service hadn’t started and the musical warm-up was going on. Teever’s giant old Bruzzi Boots made a lot of noise as he clumped along, so they slipped quickly into the very back pew, which is where they wanted to be anyway: easy in, easy out. They were both a little uncomfortable being in church, but the simple space, just a cube of whitewashed beaded board ceiling and walls and a rough plank floor, was so plain and informal that they relaxed a little. A young girl dressed in a long granny gown stepped up with her little violin to play an almost-perfect “Ashokan Farewell”
—
an off-key note and her wide blue eyes enhancing the sweet PBS poignancy of the tune. Then an old man played a buzzy keyboard and a big lady in a bluebird-colored robe rose from the side of the altar, swaying and singing in a strong, even jazzy, voice about mercy, salvation, God’s love, and life everlasting. It was rousing and lovely, even if the lady looked more like Mary Byrd’s old Carolina-blue VW Beetle than an angel, and even if the message was the spiritual version of Corelle.
Mary Byrd was surprised to hear Teever’s gravelly voice join in softly when the whole congregation began to sing. He leaned over to say proudly, “I remember some o’ them old songs, Mudbird.” She realized that at some point long ago, Teever must have had something that resembled a normal family and home life—church, regular meals and baths, and work, and maybe even school—although he never talked about it. Not to her anyway. She wondered at what point things had gone off-road for him. He hadn’t just stepped out of a cotton field. Vietnam? Or maybe before that—the Meredith crisis? Either one was enough to make a kid go wrong. Maybe she’d ask him some stuff on the way back.
It was amazing how little the country church resembled the cold and scary Catholic church of her childhood—about as much as a square dance resembled a ballet. It wasn’t even like the Episcopalian and Presbyterian churches Charles’s family attended, either. There wasn’t a lot of mumbo-jumbo, or bowing and scraping, or fancy trappings and incense. Presbyterians were pretty plain. But they were still pretty stiff. And when did they start doing communion, for god’s sake? Here—did this little church even have a name?—the
otherness
felt similar to Mary Byrd; the feeling of
them
and
me
. They knew the drills and she didn’t, not unlike the Latin masses of her childhood. But in this old rickety place, where they seemed to value light and air, and even on this dreary wintry day, it wasn’t forbidding and gloomy inside. It reminded her of Evagreen’s church. She supposed that not having a lot of dark wood beams and chiseled stone and drapey crap made the difference. The stained-glass windows weren’t advertisements for wealthy church families, but each pane was simply glazed in rectangles of blue, red, or yellow. Did people need all the trappings to feel more serious about their religion? The opposite ought to be true. No distractions. She didn’t care about any of it, but the plainness of this space seemed so much more—
something.
Holier, or homier. A holy kind of home, maybe.
The only decoration in the place, other than winter greenery—magnolia leaves and cherry laurel—was some kind of icon on the wall above the altar. She could barely make it out from so far back. The flat, expressionless face, its features crudely painted on, looked just like the Jesus face she’d seen in the spectacular cathedral at Kizhi, built all of wood without a single nail. This Jesus looked like a big rag doll that had been loin-clothed and arranged in the crucified position, although the arms of the thing were a little too straight-up—more Superman than Jesus. Or maybe the arms were supposed to be raised up to the dingy cotton-ball clouds across the top. What looked like actual bird wings stuck out from behind each shoulder, and a broken piece of chain, ends dangling, hung around its middle. Plastic greenery arched around the sides of it, and in the two bottom corners, printed large, were the Greek letters A and O. The background was either old sprigged blue fabric or patterned wallpaper bordered with large, faded gold something—rickrack?—the whole thing framed in pine with stars, or darker wooden crosses at the corners. Block-lettered on the wall beneath it were the words
and god so loved the world
. Really? Mary Byrd thought. What father would ever have sacrificed his child? But it was a very amazing piece, and it was sort of more amazing that some folk art picker asshole hadn’t come around and bought it or stolen it and sold it in Atlanta or New York for a zillion dollars. She pictured it in her living room or kitchen, looking wrong but very cool.
It dawned on Mary Byrd that even though the ankles of the icon were crossed, and it looked like there were spots where the stigmata ought to have been, it was not a crucifixion, but an ascension. She thought of the famous ones she’d seen at the Uffizi; one by Mantegna, maybe? It was a triptych, and one of the panels showed Jesus standing on a solid cloud as if he were on a cherry picker, his robes perfectly shaped and intact. He was holding a flag and surrounded by putti, and with his right hand he made the gesture he always made, a sort of gentle, instructional, palm-out-and-up gesture: “Hark, listen up, everybody.” In those old paintings, Jesus was natural and life-like and the scenes often so graphic that you totally got it about Jesus’s humanity and suffering. In the odd little puppety thing here, Mary Byrd was struck by how the figure sort of clobbered you in the same way, somehow transcending its toyness and commanding attention to the earthly lessons of Jesus’s life, and to the mystical and supernatural properties of Christianity itself, blah blah. Well, she thought, it was just a rag doll, scraps, and a Walmart glue gun, and she was just flashing on her William and Mary Renaissance Art lectures. Sometimes a weird rag-doll Jesus was just a weird rag-doll Jesus. But it did have a kind of sacred, mummy-in-the-mvsevm thing about it, some powerful voodoo appeal. Some redneck Giotto knew what he—or she—was doing.
Mary Byrd noticed that Teever was staring at it, too. She wondered if he could read the sign. Curious, she whispered to him, “Wonder what that’s about, up there.”
Without looking away from the thing he said, too loudly, “Easter.” A couple of church members turned to look back at them.
After a moment, Teever whispered more. “Mean, Jesus dead, going to heaven to be with his daddy, where people like Ernest and you an’ me
not
goin’.” Surprisingly, his voice was a tinge rueful. He cut his eyes over at her and gave her a meaningful look. Mary Byrd still couldn’t tell if he could read the message on the wall or not, but she guessed he didn’t need to. She wondered what Teever’s idea of hell might be. Parchman? She’d always joked that hell for her would be having to spend eternity tailgating in the Grove on a game day. Ha. There was probably way worse waiting for her.
She wasn’t sure why she’d decided to come to Ernest’s funeral; it wasn’t a great idea, since she’d already been gone from home for days. And then, it felt disloyal, of course. Even though it would just be an afternoon, getting away again had been a pain in the ass: arranging for picking up the children, having Charles on alert while they were home alone, feeding and walking the dogs, food, homework, same old. But partly, she truly felt the need to
mourn
. She was curious about Wallett, Ernest’s little town, and his family. And Teever had wanted badly to go, and there was no one else to take him. But she hated funerals and she hated church and there had just been so much death and awfulness going on. Had Evagreen and L. Q. gone to Roderick’s funeral? she wondered. Could Christians be true Christians and forgive a child’s murderer? Jeez. Teever hadn’t gone to Rod’s funeral; he’d been dealing with his hurt foot or something, and he wouldn’t have been welcome, probably. She hadn’t even seen Charles since she’d gotten back from Richmond; she’d come in the previous night, and he had let her sleep in and had gotten the children off and gone to work. So she’d just gone ahead and come to Wallett.