“Yes,” Curry simply says.
“It’s my understanding, Detective Sardino,” Judge Whitmore says, interrupting the questioning, “that you had the sheriff suggest to me that you might benefit from spending time at the hospital.” By the scarlet color the judge is turning, and the pointed way he’s looking at Andy Nash, it seems like the sheriff didn’t exactly tell him that Curry was really an undercover cop who was looking for my mother. “I believe I signed the papers that sent you there for observation.”
Curry says, somewhat contritely, “That’s right, Your Honor. I apologize to the court. It was the only way we could think of to place someone there in order to investigate our suspicions.”
Judge Whitmore is still looking at the sheriff, who is nervously mopping his brow with his kerchief. “Proceed,” His Honor finally says in a way that makes me think there will be quite the kick up between him and the sheriff in his chambers later on.
“Once you were admitted to the hospital, how did you go about attempting to prove your theory that Mrs. Carmody might have been committed?” Mr. Stockton asks.
“Mr. Moody had given me a picture of Mrs. Carmody. I showed that around, but none of the patients seemed to recognize her.”
Mama squeezes my hand very tightly at that point. I heard her tell Mrs. Tittle at the picnic when I was eavesdropping that she was rarely allowed out of her room.
“I also asked if they’d ever come across a patient who might be claiming that she was somebody other than who the hospital said she was,” Curry says. “Except for mentioning a woman who was known as Marie Antoinette, no one volunteered any information. I had no luck until late on the second day when I overheard the nurses talking about a woman named Laurie who insisted that her real name was Evelyn. They were discussing which of them should call Doctor Keller to up her medication. I was pretty sure then that I’d found Mrs. Carmody.”
I look back at E. J. and Dagmar again and think of the poor souls up at the Colony. I wonder how many of the patients there are truly bad off in the brain and how many are there for reasons that have nothing to do with them getting some help.
Mr. Stockton asks, “Once you were sure it was Mrs. Carmody, what did you do next, Detective?”
“I waited until the nurses went about their duties and used their phone to call Sheriff Nash and apprised him of the situation. Since the hospital is out of his jurisdiction, he had no power to have Mrs. Carmody released. We decided the quickest way to get Mrs. Carmody out of there would be to come back with Doctor Chester Keller, who was responsible for committing her in the first place.”
Judge Whitmore pounds his gavel and says, “Order.” Just about everybody in the room is saying something. Doc Keller has treated them and their children for many years. It’s hard for them to believe he’d do anything so hypocritical.
The lawyer asks a few more technical questions and then tells Curry to step down. He tips his hat as he walks past Woody, Mama, and me and right out the courtroom door. He’s leaving to go back up north to his Indian wife and his papooses, who I am sure have been missing him so badly. I told him last night after supper
grazie
again. Woody gave him a drawing she had done of him playing his harmonica over at the hobo camp. And when E. J. coughed up one of his arrowheads as a going-away present, Curry got as emotional as one of Mama’s Italian opera albums.
When Sheriff Andy Nash gets up to the stand, his testimony is to the point. Even though he is sweating so bad that his uniform shirt has turned from brown to black, he is coolly concise when he relates his part in rescuing Mama. The folks in the gallery let out a cheer for our hometown hero when he steps down from the box.
And, of course, my uncle Sam. He gets up and corroborates what Curry had to say, only in his much slower way. There’s a cheer for him, too. But mostly from the colored people.
Others are waiting to tell their side of the story as well.
I’m sure Dagmar Epps will be asked by the prosecution to testify to what she told Curry up in the hobo camp about being taken away to the Colony to have that operation by order of Papa, who would only do something that awful because Grampa made him.
Doc Keller, who committed Mama to the hospital even though there wasn’t a thing wrong with her except a desire to be her own untrampled person, also has a lot to answer for.
And Remmy Hawkins. He told the sheriff he found Mama’s bloody blouse over at the Triple S under a rock, which was a big fat pimply lie told to incriminate Sam—I hope he gets sent to Sing Sing, but he’ll probably only have to report to the detention center over in Bedford County.
My mother still has to say what happened to her, too. But she met with the judge earlier today and asked that Woody and me be disallowed from hearing any testimony that might “scar my children more than they’ve already been scarred.”
So at high noon Judge Whitmore pounds his gavel and says, “We will break for lunch and resume in one hour without the children present.”
On our way out of the courtroom, I look over at Papa, Grampa, and Uncle Blackie. They barely made it out of the burning house alive and I bet some days they wished they hadn’t. I’ve spent enough time in my father’s courtroom to know that the three of them will be bound over for trial. They will be found guilty and sent away for a very long time for what they’ve done. If I never see Grampa or Blackie again, it won’t be too soon, but to Papa I stop and say, “I’ll write to you,” and then I run out of that courtroom before he can say, “Don’t bother. I don’t ever want to hear from you again, you little traitor.”
W
e stop for an ice cream on the ride over to Granny Beezy’s. (She has given Woody and me permission to call her that, which we took to right off.) Mama wants Woody and me to stay at her house on Monroe Street for the rest of the afternoon until she is finished up in the courtroom.
Mama and my twin and I are sitting on the banks of the Maury River, cooling our heels, eating our cones, and watching the water float by. I am certain that Mama is about to say something about tomorrow being a river ready to carry us to our fondest dreams because it seems like something she would say at a time like this, but after being still for the longest while, she tells us in a voice that sounds like it’s about to break into many pieces, “Emily Dickinson wrote, ‘The past is not a package one can lay away,’ but . . . we’re going to do our best to do just that, aren’t we, peas?”
Woody nods in agreement, but I don’t. I think to myself—that Emily Dickinson. She is always right on the money.
C
hapter Thirty-seven
W
e’ve been settled in our new house for almost three weeks.
The gray Victorian is sort of run-down and does not show a lot of promise of picking itself up. It reminds me a lot of something you’d find over at What Goes Around Comes Around. There are no glorious woods of birch and ash and no creek with stepping stones. No wide veranda with a welcoming porch swing that invites you to while away an afternoon. No barn. In the backyard, there’s a dilapidated doghouse. Ivory uses it to store his bones, but is happier snoring on the other side of Woody at bedtime.
It didn’t take us anytime at all to get set up. We had nothing to unpack. Everything we owned was destroyed in the fire. Even my binoculars. We have done some shopping. Mama bought us books and clothes and a new hi-fi. She really missed her show tunes in the hospital, but she no longer sings along. She told Woody and me, “As soon as I rebuild my strength, we’ll fix up the house. And I’m going to get that job at the library that I was thinking about getting before . . .”
She trails off like that a lot. I can hear her muffled crying through the thin walls some nights, but when I crawl in bed with her, she pretends to be asleep. So I just hold her hand and tell her,
“Hushacat.”
Sometimes I see Mama floating about in the garden from our bedroom window or perched stiffly on the new reading bench, staring off into the distance to the twin peaks of House Mountain. I’m thinking that once she gets her library job she’ll perk up some. We don’t need the money she’ll make because she has her inheritance, but she tells me she
wants
to work, which is proof that she’s not bouncing back as fast as I hoped she would.
Woody, Granny Beezy, and I went over to Slidell’s this afternoon to pick up a few odds and ends for the get-together we’re having tonight. That was kind of sad because farewells always are. Vera Ledbetter and her parrot, Sunny Boy, are preparing to fly the coop. Vera wants to go back to her old job entertaining the sailors in Norfolk. She told Woody and me over a couple of brown cows, “Thank you for wantin’ me to stay and be part of your lives, but ya know, I got my own people that I’ve been missin’. Me and Sunny’ll come back for visits. You girls take care good care of your mama, ya hear?” And then she gave us a french fry-smelling hug and some free licorice. As Woody and I were walking out the drugstore door, I heard her tell Beezy, “I tried to walk the straight and narrow, but there’s a lot less nastiness in my previous line of work. More customer appreciation and less wear on my feet, too.”
Since their cottage also burned down in “The Lilyfield Blaze,” Mr. Cole and Louise are staying with Vera until she leaves, and then they’ll take over the lease on the house. They are still our help even if they don’t live with us anymore. As a way of thanking Lou for taking such good care of her girls while she was gone, Mama told me last week when she was braiding my hair, “I’m going to help Louise start up her own business. The women in Mudtown don’t have a beauty salon of their own. I think it’s about time they do.”
I am for that whole hog because Lou really does do good braids and, of course, I will never forget how she saved us by running to the sheriff that night and telling him to go rescue me and Woody. She was mighty brave to risk that. Sometimes just one courageous act is enough for you to change your opinion about somebody, don’t you think? Out of the goodness of my heart, I did not tell Mama how Lou was carrying on with Blackie in the meadow after midnight or how hellaciously mean she was to Woody and me once she’d taken up with him. You know why? Because now I got something to hold over her if she gets it into her mind to quit acting like her former Louisiana self and reverts back to her unrelenting personality self. (Like I mentioned earlier, it is always nice to have an ace up your sleeve.)
Mr. Cole offered to build Woody and me a new fort in the backyard of the new house. I thought about that long and hard, and so did Woody. We ended up telling him, “No, thank you, but we reserve the right to change our mind.” The fort came to mean so many things to us and I think we need time to sort out the good from the bad and see which one wins.
I went up to Lilyfield and the fort tree a few days ago all by myself and kicked around the rubble to see if there was anything left I could save. I found a piece of the family picnic picture that had been taken in more carefree days in the field of lilies. All that love. Gone. And just for a second, looking down at the bit of photo, I hated Papa for making that the truth. I also found the rusty coffee can altar and Saint Jude, too. I’m going to clean that statue off and give him to Woody on our birthday next month, which is very unselfish of me because she will get so above herself on that lost-causes topic.
“Evenin’, Shen. Woody,” Sam says, coming through the garden gate. My sister is sitting on the nearby glider, working on a drawing, Ivory’s snout in her lap. I have seen Mama and Sam holding hands, stealing glances at each other when they don’t think anybody’s watching, but I’m still not sure if that’s in a friendly family way or not. I do know that she never takes off the
Speranza
watch he gave her. We still go to the library every Tuesday afternoon, and they still talk about Shakespeare, but I think they’re working their way alphabetical through the stacks because now they love to discuss Mark Twain a little bit more.
Woody smiles and nods at him. I look up and say, “Hey.” He looks fancier than usual and is not smelling like gas.
Sam sits down next to me and asks, “What are you writing?”
“Just putting the finishin’ touches on my diary.”
Mama takes Woody and me to Charlottesville every week to a special kind of doctor who does not stick you with needles or take your temperature. He’s got a comfortable office with beanbag chairs and he helps you talk about what’s ailing you. Not your body, but your heart and head. Dr. Ellis Wilson, Ph.D., was the one who suggested I start writing about my feelings and just about whatever else comes up in my life. I thought that was a good idea. I mean, if Woody and me are going to move to New York City someday so she can be the next Toulouse-Lautrec and I can be the next Harper Lee, I better start practicing.
I ask Sam, “You wanna hear some of what I wrote?”
“Can’t imagine anything I’d enjoy more,” he says, because that’s the kind of encouraging man he is.
I read, “‘Dear Diary, Big day today for so many different reasons. Remmy Hawkins got put in the detention center just like I thought he would. And his grandfather, Mayor Jeb Hawkins, got kicked out of office. I don’t know why, but I’ll ask Granny Beezy tomorrow, she will have heard the gossip by then. She told me this morning when Woody and I were over at her house watching E. J. mow the lawn, that she heard Muffy Mitchell tell June Harding that Miss Abigail Hawkins is dating a man who sells saddles and bridles in Farmville.’”
Sam chuckles at that, and so does Woody, the same way I did when I heard that news about horsey Miss Abigail.
“‘And . . . ,’” I continue after I turn the page, “‘Papa, Grampa, and Uncle Blackie all left for Red Onion State Prison today.’” There never was a trial. Bobby Rudd advised them to make a deal for a lesser sentence. “‘A picture in the newspaper showed the three of them getting on the bus. His Honor looked handsome.’”
Songs of evening blackbirds and a couple of ambitious crickets, a dog barking the next street over, are the only sounds hanging in the air until Sam says thoughtfully, “This is hard on you, isn’t it, Shenny.”