Authors: Howard Owen
Kenny had something else to say, too, and he said it carefully, back on his heels.
“I know you don't want to hear this, and I believe you totally when you say it was Pooh on the phone. It sounds like something the sick bastard would do. But, just because he's mad enough at you to kill that cat still doesn't prove he did anything to Miss Jenny.”
“If he's sick enough to hang a cat,” Georgia said, “he's sick enough to kill a defenseless old lady. Hell, the cat probably put up a better fight.”
She is still furious at Wade Hairr and his useless, loose-lipped office, and furious at herself for giving them something they could blab to Pooh Blackwell and his father.
Kenny told her it would be easy for a person to park in a certain lane that leads into the woods off the Old Geddie Road and walk from there to the edge of the field, where the cats usually congregated.
Probably, Georgia realized, that person could see them clearly in the house from there, too.
“That one was probably easier to catch,” Kenny added, “being half tame and all.”
No good deed goes unpunished, Georgia thought. They'll keep that little bit of information from Leeza even after the baby is born and they have to tell her what happened to Nails.
This morning, her nerves are so shaky that, when one of the two children in Geddie Presbyterian drops a hymnal to the wooden floor in the middle of Reverend Weeks' tepid sermon, she jumps and turns to glare at the boy. The little pistol sits in her jacket pocket, wrapped inside a rag. Every once in a while, she reaches in to feel it there. She is ashamed of how much comfort it gives her, perhaps as much as she is getting from Reverend Weeks' half-heard sermon.
Neither Justin nor Leeza came this morning. Georgia sits next to Forsythia. Neither of them mention Forsythia's Thanksgiving revelation, and Georgia doubts they ever will.
Afterward she speaks to Minnie McCauley, Alberta Horne, and some of the other older women.
“You're gettin' to be a regular around here,” Murphy Lee Roslin says, and Georgia smiles. She wonders how long she can stay. Common sense tells her to get in her van and head north this very afternoon. Let Justin handle the sale of the house and land, if such a sale ever comes about. Something else, stubbornness, she supposes, keeps her in East Geddie. She wonders if she isn't staying the course just to make up for the times she didn't, and if she isn't compounding her problems by doing so.
On top of everything, it looks as if Justin, Kenny, and Blue really are going to go into this blue-sky business venture, selling Carolina watermelons, strawberries, greens, pork, and whatever else they can produce to Manhattanites. They've talked twice more, and they'll meet this afternoon to see if they can agree on enough things to take it to a lawyer.
If that happens, Georgia supposes, the idea of selling Littlejohn McCain's farm is a moot point. As much as she cringes at the thought of her well-educated son living permanently in this place, she won't sell it out from under him if that's what he wants. She's told him, after finally expressing her reservations, that she'll charge him some nominal rent if he wants to do this.
Part of keeping Justin in the dark about some of Pooh's meanness is the realization that, if her son really is going to live down hereânight and day, as Kenny saysâhe's not going to need a blood feud with the Blackwells. She doesn't want Justin carrying a gun around with him, or a carpet knife.
Sunday afternoon, after all the dishes have been washed, Leeza goes to rest, and Georgia and her son are alone. One of the benefits of this self-imposed exile has been the occasional quiet time with Justin. They didn't have as many of those as she would have hoped when they were living in the same house in Montclair. Leeza wasn't taking afternoon naps then, for one thing, and Justin was working, and Georgia was still teaching. And, she thinks now, she was crazy. That didn't help.
Now, a few of those moments do ambush them and thus make them drop their guards.
They have the old fireplace working. Justin cut up some fallen pines back in the early fall and has been chopping them into more or less firewood-size chunks. He says it's good exercise.
They've only had three or four fires so far, and Georgia is still afraid that the chimney will catch from whatever they haven't cleaned out of there. She can still remember how the house in which she grew up was totaled by tenants misusing a faulty fireplace.
Today, though, it feels good. For all its improvements, the old house is drafty. She sits on an old sofa they've moved within 10 feet of the fire and puts her sock-clad feet on the coffee table. She has a book in her hand that she never gets around to opening.
Lost in thought, she is half-asleep when Justin flops down beside her.
“So,” he says, “is this the way you remember the old home place? I mean, is this how it was when you were a girl?”
“You forget, I didn't live here as a girl. I was already in college when Mom and Daddy moved in here, after his mother and brother and sister died.”
She wondered at the time if they had lost their minds, taking a couple of steps back in terms of modern comforts from their comfortable little house next door, but theyâher mother, reallyâbrought the old place back to and beyond whatever it had been in its so-called heyday.
“So you grew up in the other house, the one that burned down?”
“There used to be a crêpe myrtle out there to mark it,” Georgia says, staring into the fire. “I guess it died, too. I don't remember when.”
“I thought this place was so cool when I was a little kid.”
Georgia looks at him in disbelief.
“You were bored to tears by this place, Justin. We had to threaten you or bribe you to get you to come down here.”
“Well,” he says, shrugging, “maybe when I was older. But I don't remember it like that.”
“I hated it here,” Georgia says. “I could not wait to get away. I guess those farmer genes just skip a generation.”
Justin looks over at her.
“I don't think it's genetic. You know, I'd never grown anything in my life until Guatemala. We didn't even have a garden.”
“That was the plan.”
“But there was something about the way they were living down there. I don't mean the poverty and the oppression. The farming cycle, the seasonsâI know you think harmony with nature and all that is a bunch of bullshit, but it felt right to me. I think that was what made life bearable for them in spite of everything else. I didn't plan on anything like this, didn't think about it until you decided to sell the farm, but it occurred to me more than once down there that, if you had your own place and some good topsoil and didn't have to live such a hand-to-mouth existence, working the land wouldn't be such a bad thing to do.”
Georgia thinks it must be her and Jeff's total denial of the natural world when he was growing up that has made Justin see Littlejohn McCain's old farm, or what's left of it, as some kind of Eden. They'd both grown up in the lonesome, sandspurs-and-pines Carolina country and had had enough to last a lifetime, they assured each other.
“If your granddad had known you were going to become such a son of the soil,” she tells him, “maybe he'd have left you a bigger piece of it. And we could have saved all that money on college tuition.”
“Well,” he says, “it might not work out. You've always told me that you shouldn't be afraid to try different things, otherwise how are you going to find what makes you happy?”
Hoisted, Georgia thinks, by my own petard.
“Some of it,” she says, taking an intuitive leap, “might be the same thing that got you into the Peace Corps.”
He looks at her, then back into the fire.
“Huh,” he says. “I never thought of that. I mean, East Geddie isn't exactly Guatemala, and Kenny and Blue can teach me a hell of a lot more than I can teach them. All I'm bringing is a little bit of land and some contacts up north.”
He leaves to bring in another log from the back porch and tosses it into the fire, making sparks fly out on the floor in front of them.
“But, yeah, OK. Maybe I like the idea that I'm not living some place where everybody is just like me. Maybe everything you always taught me, about everyone being equal, not looking down your nose at people just because they didn't pick their parents or place of birth better, maybe that does mean something to me.”
Georgia wonders how he has managed to give her credit for instilling all the right values in him and at the same time make it seem like a rebuke of her entire life. You didn't have to
do
all that stuff, she wants to tell him. They were just general guidelines. Do as I do, not as I say.
Justin doesn't raise his voice during any of this. He is calm and determined, the way Georgia has seen him at times in his life since he was old enough to reason. He was like this before he decided he was going to play midget football, and he stuck with it through three seasons despite the fact that anyone could see he didn't even like the sport that much or have any aptitude for it. He was like this when he told her he was joining the Peace Corps.
Arguing won't do any good.
She can't resist one more shot, though.
“Why,” she asks him, “weren't you listening to me when I would wail and moan about what a boring, dead-end place East Geddie was? Why didn't that take?”
He laughs.
“I don't know. There was always this feeling I had that you were protesting too much, like if you didn't keep up this barrier, you'd be drawn right back down here, and you'd feel like a failure, like you were trapped.”
“And,” Georgia says, holding out her arms, “here I am, God help me.”
She could, she feels sure, live here if she had to, if there were no other place to go. The thing she doesn't have, she supposes, is that oft-referenced sense of place. She's never felt as if she was “from” Montclair, and she doesn't feel she's “from” East Geddie, either. The whole point, when she left home, was to be comfortable everywhere, be a citizen of the world.
The only problem, she thinks, is that sometimes she is not really comfortable anywhere these days. She almost envies Wade Hairr and William Blackwell and the others who don't seem to have to go anywhere new, learn anything new, see anything new.
“How about Leeza?” she asks. “How is she going to take to all this?”
“She's more into it than I am,” Justin says. “She's always lived in these little houses, smaller than ours, nowhere to be by yourself, nothing to call her own. She thinks she'll love it, our kids running all around the yard, lots of dogs and cats.”
At the mention of cats, they both wince.
“I know you're not happy that we're not married,” he says, and Georgia is quiet. “I know this isn't the way you imagined it would be. You probably saw me getting my Ph.D., maybe going to some Ivy League school, marrying somebody with two or three degrees.”
Georgia tries to protest, weakly, but Justin continues over her.
“But I love her, Mom. And if she'll ever agree to marry me, I'll take her up on it in a heartbeat.”
“If she'll â¦?”
“That's just between you and me.”
Georgia finds that, the older she gets, the more her assumptions about life are embarrassingly, achingly wrong.
Leeza, it turns out, is so soured on the whole concept of marriage after 19 years under her parents' roof that she is convinced a wedding will ruin whatever happiness they have.
“Her parents should have gotten divorced a long time ago,” Justin says. “They made you and Dad look like great role models.”
He looks over at her quickly.
“Sorry. I mean, you
were
great role models. Just because you didn't get along didn't mean you didn't love me. I know that now.”
Georgia thanks him for that, patting him on his knee. She's truly glad that Jeff and Justin have stayed fairly close, although Jeff's second family out in California has put some distance between them.
We did get along, though, she thinks. If Jeff could have kept his dick in his pants when he wasn't in her company, it would have all been different. They'd probably still be married. It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't bad, nothing to break up a family over. Except for that. It isn't hard to understand, but she isn't up, even now, to explaining it to her son.
“Well, honey,” Georgia says, realizing she hasn't called him that in years, “I hope this farming idea turns out to be the thing that makes you happy.”
Although part of her hopes he's back in graduate school by the next fall semester.
By the time Leeza rises from her nap, Justin has gone over to Kenny's. Georgia can see Blue's truck parked in the driveway.
“Big business next door,” she says as Leeza looks out the window, holding her hands against the wall as she leans forward. Georgia wonders if she will need help standing up again, she is so front-heavy.
“I think it's really neat,” Leeza says, popping back to full vertical mode with hardly a hitch. “I mean, we'll be growing our own crops, selling food for other people. We're going to make it all organic.”
Including the pork, Georgia thinks but doesn't say. Leeza, she thinks, should have come of age in the late '60s. She'd have been in her element in one of the communes, like the one a couple of Georgia's friends joined. They tried to get her to come with them to some place out in Oregon, but she told them she went to college so she wouldn't ever have to go back to the earth again.
She wants to give Leeza the benefit of the doubt, allow for the possibility that this could turn out well, somehow. She doesn't know when she got so judgmental, always thinking she knows what's best, always having to stifle herself from giving one and all unsolicited advice.
“Organic,” she says, and nods. “That's good.”