Well, he had a point. I was different. I’d been unconscious most of my adult life. I gave up and I switched off. But somehow I had switched back on. It scared me because I already knew I could never go back and be the other way anymore. Dashnell was trying to say that it was on account of Carmen. It was more on account of Lily. The thing that had sealed it for me was the man in the boat. I had come around to the untenable conclusion that my willful ignorance had murdered him in absentia. I had to change as part of my atonement for that.
“Dashnell,” I said, “I can’t live with you anymore—not knowing what you and the others did to that man.” I have to experience a thing before I can put it to words and mean it. A lot of people can take an idea from a book or another person and grab hold of the logic of it and use it straight off. But I have to do it to learn it. I have to look back over my shoulder at a thing I did or said or thought and hear myself talk about it before I know I mean it. Most of what I say to other people is just expressing it for myself. I was saying it and meaning it.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Murder,” I said sadly.
“You have completely lost yourself.”
He was white as a sheet. He swallowed his beer whole and went in for another one.
“Dashnell,” I started, “Dashnell, you ought to leave off that beer and see what the world looks like. You’re afraid of what the world looks like. It scares you, so you try to hide from it up here on this lake.”
“This lake is all the decent left in the world, fool.”
One other thing we learned in discussion group was that if you want to make a point with someone, then choose your most important point and say it simple.
“I’m leaving. Tomorrow.”
“Why?”
I wanted so badly to say because I’m not wasting another precious second of my life with an ape. But how do you make that point with an ape? All I knew was that I’d been out on that lake in the boat. I don’t mean a revelation came shimmering down from the stars. I mean I did it, alone, after midnight, despite how it looked, not knowing what I was doing or why, only that I was doing something.
Doing
something!
“Murder.” He was back. I was pretty sure he’d poured some bourbon into that can of beer in his hand.
“Murder,” I repeated, “the murder of the white race and the American dream and life as any decent person once knew it.”
I don’t know when he became so obsessed with it.
“Did you shoot him?
He give a little half grunt, half laugh.
“Yeah.”
“I think you ought to do the right thing.”
Lily said later I was courageous to talk to him like that. I never worry too much about expressing an opposite opinion to Dashnell. He puts no store in what I have to say about anything.
“What right thing?”
“I think you ought to go down there to the sheriff’s office and turn yourself in.”
He was watching me, trying to figure out how far I was going to go with this thing.
“Why don’t you go down there and tell him for me?”
“Because I have no facts.” That wasn’t why. I knew the sheriff would laugh in my face, pat me on the shoulder, tell me I was out of my mind and say what a good man Dashnell was.
“Well, then, what are you going to do about it?”
“I guess I’m going to leave.”
“It all went wrong when Carmen was took,” he started.
I wouldn’t listen to it anymore. “You don’t want it to go right, Dashnell.”
He was staring through me as if I were his executioner.
“If you wanted it to go right, Dashnell, you would have admitted a long time ago how little Carmen meant to you.”
He chugged his beer and went back inside for another.
“I didn’t see you coaching his Little League or taking him to Boy Scouts. You never once tried to help him with his homework or took him camping or ball games or the movies. You shoved him aside years and years before he was taken.” I had always imagined I’d rail when I finally got those words out. I didn’t. I just said them.
“This ain’t you,” he said.
“It’s what I’ve come down to,” I answered.
Dashnell walked back into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, took out another beer, walked out the door and got into his truck. I was already on the phone telling Mother to expect me by the time he started the engine.
R
ose of Sharon didn’t give me but a few hours’ notice. I couldn’t work wonders. Nadine knew a woman and her daughter who clean and such. They’re not cheap but they come on short notice. They got Rose of Sharon’s bedroom emptied out inside half an hour. I’d been storing things in it for twenty or thirty years. They polished it up and we all held our breath when they pulled the curtains out of the washer, but the thread held. The lace shone. It’s the best bedroom suite in the house. They call it Empire. It came from France. It drank lemon oil until it shone. It shamed me to have one corner of the house looking that nice. It showed me how far I’d let the rest go.
I have been hoping Rose of Sharon would leave Dashnell since the day she married him. In many ways I have always considered it an inevitability. I never dreamed that she’d leave him to come home. She didn’t ever say why she left Dashnell or if it’s for good. I have an idea that it is for good. It was one thing to marry him hoping he’d pull himself up. It would be quite another to go back to him now that she sees how far he’s gone down. I knew he would. I take no pleasure in that fact. He had nothing to work with, no education or land or family money. He was bound to turn out low and to be proud of it like almost all the rest of the Lawlers.
I’m glad to have Rose of Sharon’s company, but I try not to let on
too much because I don’t want her to have any mixed feelings about leaving if that’s her intent. Meanwhile, it’s a wonderful thing to be able to go to bed and lock the doors. I had taken the habit of leaving a door unlocked in case I die in the night. It would be an awful thing for her or Nadine to have to get someone to break the door to haul me out.
Rose of Sharon has a touch, a way of cleaning yet leaving things the way they were. She stays up to all hours running rags over everything. She says it relaxes her. It relaxes me to fall asleep in a house where someone else is awake, someone still part of the world.
Nadine is over here every morning exactly two minutes after Rose of Sharon leaves for Wal-Mart, trying to find out if she’s shared anything. Like I’d tell Nadine if she had. I didn’t realize how possessive of the place Nadine had become until Rose of Sharon came home. That’s because she has no stake anyplace else.
Rose of Sharon has never complained to me about Dashnell. She wouldn’t dare. I would have taken the opportunity to tell her all over again how stupid she was to marry him in the first place. At least I would have until a few years ago. I finally realized a thing like that is far more complicated than my addled brain could ever grasp. I’m stronger than I am smart. Rose is exactly the opposite. My guess would be that Rose has regretted marrying Dashnell almost from the beginning. Her torment now isn’t the fact that she’s finally left him. Her torture is knowing it took her three decades to find the gumption. Like I say, this is all guesswork.
I judged her very harshly for putting up with Dashnell all those years. I said very little. I didn’t have to say much. It stood between Rose of Sharon and me. Lawler men are renowned for beating their wives. There’s not a doubt in my mind that he beat her. Lawlers are low people. Dashnell is the lowest. I was very selfish. I considered her marriage to Dashnell a direct insult to me and all that I had tried to teach her. Searle chastised me for that until the very end. He said that her marriage to Dashnell was proof positive of our failure to provide her with other options.
I could have made a difference. I could have gone to her a hundred times and begged her to leave him. I could have insisted that
she go to college and paid her way through any school in this country. She was a straight-A student. We might have sent her to Europe. I could have opened a hundred other doors than the one she took for fear of winding up old and alone at home. I didn’t do anything except put on a fine wedding so that Dashnell’s people would be embarrassed and uncomfortable. I guess as her mother I figured I had the right to expect her to go off and do all the things I never had the guts to do myself. I took it personally when she didn’t. That’s a whole lot worse than what she did trying to tough it out with Dashnell all those years.
She seems to like it here. She talks a lot about restoring the house. She sits for hours and listens as I go on about how everything looked when I was a girl. I told her she can do anything she likes with the place. I warned her, though, if she’s not careful, she’ll wake the dead.
I
had begun to think Lily had finally come to appreciate what we have. Her attitude lightened up. She left off the wine. She made good dinners and helped the kids with their homework. We started having what I thought were some pretty good times in the bedroom. I thought building the house up here on the lake had finally begun to work.
How in God’s name could I have been that stupid—twice? I can’t confront her with it, not even indirectly, because underneath all my rage is the fear of driving her away, a woman who has given me two doses of the worst pain I ever experienced in my life. A woman who consumed my youth and put me in horrible debt. A woman who preyed on what was once my normal insecurity until it snaked into out and out madness.
The day I closed on this house Lily and I brought the kids up here and we had a picnic on the porch. I looked over the yard at that water and I thought there was more peace per square yard up here than anyplace I’d ever seen. It’s not pretty to me anymore. It’s evil. It’s cursed. If I believed in ghosts, I’d say it was haunted.
I don’t mean one pure, unholy evil spread by the Antichrist. I mean layers of evil, each one giving rise to the next, mounting up until you have to run or join in. Mine started with weakness. I shoved that whole Dallas mess under the rug as quickly as I could.
Out of weakness and fear came a whole storm of lies—all amounting to my choice to believe that Lily had come home to stay. Her lies like where we got our boy Travis. That led me to lie to myself and say I didn’t care as long as I had a fine, healthy son. The more I think of him as mine, the more it torments me that Lily and I never had that conversation. There can’t be any truth between Lily and me. Facts would disintegrate the little we have left.
That’s just the beginning. I lied to myself about this house and the peace it would bring us. The truth is I went into twice as much hock as I could afford because I thought up here, off the beaten path, there wouldn’t be much to tempt her.
She’s powerless over men, especially halfway decent looking young men. She can’t help but throw herself at them. She’s sick with discontentment. She has a burning need for whatever she doesn’t have.
You tell yourself you love her out of some spiritual goodness. You do it for her; you’re making some kind of noble sacrifice, you’re building your Christian character. Here’s where the anger gets mixed into the weakness and the fear. A man who seeks out a woman he knows isn’t trustworthy is buying himself a ready-made right to hate her. Justified hate entitles a man to feel moral about doing evil things. Sometimes evil things cross my mind.
I went what you’d call the regular way a long time ago. That meant ignoring my curious side. People say things. True things. Other people like me don’t want to hear them because we don’t want to tamper with the status quo. I’ll say right here and now that it was Lily who made me acutely aware of that about myself.
I was so dead set on removing Lily from all temptation that I didn’t think. I jumped at the chance to move up here without looking the local environs over carefully. This is no ordinary neighborhood. People are far more interested in what you think than what you have. You’re in or you’re out up here. You’re with the others or you’re on their hit list. They’re organized. They’re working evil at night. They know I’ve got them figured out. They’re waiting to see if I’ll join. I may have to eventually. If I don’t, we may burn in our beds.
I can feel the evil beginning to add up: mine, Lily’s, theirs, those broken men who kill in the night.
I was out in the yard sawing firewood. The sun was weak behind the clouds. The sky was spitting ice. I had just worked up a sweat when Dashnell Lawler came stumbling down his back steps.
“Hey,” he says, smiling with menace.
“How’s it going?” I said, trying to figure some way to get rid of him without offending him. He was stinking drunk.
“Smells like rain.”
It was drizzling, but I don’t argue the inconsequential with a drunkard who stands there running a penknife under his fingernails.
“The wife left me.” He grinned like it had nothing to do with that fact he was stinking drunk at one o’clock on a Saturday afternoon as always.
“I’m sorry.”
“It don’t make me no never mind.” He used the phrase in a self-satisfied way like he’d invented it.
“Oh, go on. A thing like that is never easy.”
“I’d a hell of a lot rather have my wife leave me plain than slip around on me in plain sight.”
“I would too.” I forced a grin figuring the best defense was to pretend ignorance.
Dashnell jumped straight to his point. “So then, how is it with you? I mean, which way is the wind blowing? Are you for or against?”
“I’m sorry?” I had his drift but I didn’t want it. I offered him a glass of iced tea. He asked for whiskey. I got him a shot and sat him down on a lawn chair.
“You got a note on this place?”
I said, who didn’t have a note on their place? He made some statement about the interest on the note going to pay nigger welfare. I didn’t follow. But I pursed my lips to give him the impression I did.