Uncivil Seasons (38 page)

“I didn’t see that,” said Cuddy.

I asked him, grinning again, “Did you round them up and make them come here?”

“Well, it is April Fool’s today. But I believe this was Paula’s idea.”

“Good Christ, did she give in and go back to Graham?”

She and their two kids went back to the Maple Street house. Because Charlene came to our conclusion that Little Preston did a noble deed trying to keep her out of the state pen where her sweet-talking ways might have gotten her face torn off and her hair (umm! you notice that?) ripped out by some of the inmates there, whom I have seen at the lady convicts’ wrestling finals, and I don’t believe even Graham would take them on without a sledgehammer. So Charlene the Hot Tamale has kissed and made up with Preston, and love’s gonna live there again. Paula went on back because she didn’t want Charlene to have to live in that house again with the Pope boys unchaperoned, which she believes no woman should have to do, and I can see her point. But Paula is not living there, as she put it, as man and wife. She is holding herself in reserve, like those Greek ladies in
La Strada
.”

“
Lysistrata
.”

“That’s right. One of those foreign films. And speaking of man and wife, look here.” He loped around to the bedside, tugging out a small jeweler’s box; in it was a diamond ring in a circle of tiny sapphires the color of his eyes. “You think Junior’ll like it? I put it on my Visa card. I just have the feeling she’s going to say yes. Don’t you?” Head tilted, he grimaced.

“I hope so, Cuddy. She ought to.”

He flopped down into the wheelchair and spun it in a circle. “Oh, lordy, if she doesn’t, I’m gonna, I’m gonna….” He stopped and sighed loudly, for the first time in our acquaintance robbed of his rich mint of words.

I said, “Did you buy those clothes to propose in?” For he was wearing a Harris tweed jacket with a gray wool knit tie.

“First, I tried on a bunch in your closet, but the pants were knickerbockers on me. Tell you the truth, I came into a little extra money. This is going to spook you, Justin. I almost didn’t want to tell you. You remember those basketball scores Mrs. Cadmean gave me the night she died, off the top of her head? I won the pool. I won the damn NCAA basketball pool! First time in my life! Can you believe that?”

I could see Joanna’s face, see the perfect smooth profile, feel the calm gray eyes on mine, hear her voice soft and absolute as a dream saying to me, Let go—saying to me what she could not tell herself. I said, “Oh, yes, I believe it.” The face moved close to mine, translucent now.

Cuddy was saying, “No, I already wore these clothes when I took Junior over to see her old man.”

The gray eyes closed and the face faded away.

I said, “Sorry? You got Briggs to go see Cadmean?”

“Ummm.”

“How’d it go?”

He spun the chair in a slow circle. “I’ll say this. If you stood between her and her dad in your shorts, your pecker wouldn’t be too much use to you afterward, due to falling off from frostbite.” Cuddy yanked up his hair. “I hate to confess this because I am a strictly moral man, but I
liked
the fat old bastard.”

I laughed, and winced. “I also hate to confess it, as he is not a strictly moral man…any chance Ron Willis will tie Cadmean in for us about those Ames papers?”

“I deeply doubt it.”

“It’s not over, Cuddy. Luster was working for somebody. I just know it.”

“Doctor D’s happy. He found some of that yellow carpet’s fibers on Luster’s sneakers. Plus a speck of Mrs. Dollard’s type blood, plus a sliver of some kind of expensive grass the Dollards had planted out there, plus dog hairs, plus Lord knows what all else; so he’s happy, and Ken Moize is happy. Luster did it. And the state rests. We’ve got nothing on Ron Willis except his whinging a few shots at you, which appears to be a popular Hillston pastime. He can prove where he was the night of the robbery. Just because he knew Hudson and just because he handed Charlene a bag, doesn’t make him a murderer. Or even an accessory. Meanwhile, Hophead Ron has come up with some real fancy lawyers that wouldn’t use Joe Lieberman to lick their stamps, and they are arguing he wasn’t even shooting at you. Just disturbing the peace, under the influence, and driving so as to endanger.”

“I think old Briggs hired Willis to find somebody to steal those copies of the Ames papers. Cloris
had
them. Somebody took them.”

“Oh, lordy. You are stubborn. Well, it wasn’t Cary Bogue; he said he never saw them, and for us to stop pestering him. Anyhow, Fatso the Bald and I didn’t get into that aspect of our rela tionship when I was over there. It was personal.”

“What did you say to him?”

“Not much. I’ve been told that I’m a talker, but between your mama and my future pa-in-law, I believe I’ve been overrated.”

“So, what did he say?”

Now Cuddy jumped out of the chair and blew up his cheeks and poked his finger at his pursed lips. “Says, ‘Who the shit are you, son? Huh? Huh? Huh?’ Says, ‘I truly, truly believe I know you from somewhere, your particular ugly face strikes a chord of memory in my old ossified vicious self-adulating mind. Didn’t your daddy used to work on my line? Huh? Huh? Now, shit, you’re not diddling with my Baby, are you? Even if that child did sew a stone up in my heart. Because if I hear—and my ears are big as the sky—if I hear you are not doing right by my Princess, I’m going to have to send some boys from C&W over to pull off your arms and club you to death with them. Son.’”

I said, “Let me quote a friend: ‘You are messing with the big boys now, Mangum.’”

He winked, “Oh, I expect that man is going to just love me if he lives long enough. I’m not going to let him see his grandchildren unlest he improves his character.”

“Forget it, Cuddy. He’s too old for improvement. And I’m not sure what’s coming along behind him is any better.”

“Are you in reference to Lawry Whetstone?”

“For one.”

“The Whetstones are on a cruise to the Caribbean. What with you whopping him and throwing her over, they needed to rest up. Fatso gave me the news when I was over at his castle that he personally sent old Lawry off on this vacation and told him don’t rush back. They don’t appear to be too friendly.” Cuddy ate two chocolate turtles out of the box on my bedside table, then leaned over and shook my foot. “All right, now, when are you going to unhook your catheter and come on back to work? Not that it’s as much fun around there now that old fathead V.D.’s left us to go tame the West.”

“Have I still got a job?”

“Yep. Fact is, the new captain’s a friend of your family’s, you know how family connections always help. He even got you a raise so you could make your piano payments.” Cuddy draped his (apparently new) London Fog raincoat over his lanky shoulder.

I pulled myself carefully up on the pillows. “New captain? Have we got a new captain? Who?”

At the door, sun twinkled the blue-jay eyes. “Oh, a real brainy guy.”

“
Who
?”

“Me.” He waved a salute and closed the door.

I was home by Easter, sleeping on the couch downstairs across from my new ebony spinet. Above the piano, beside my father’s watercolor, now hung the pencil sketch Joanna Cadmean had drawn the first day we met; Alice said it didn’t look like me.

Propped on my cane, I watched Alice, day by day, move through the house, and leave it rich with her presence, with a vase pulled forward on a table, with apple juice shining in the refrigerator, with her small earth-dark gardening gloves placed one upon another in the windowsill.

While she was gone, I followed her days, saw her walking along the aisles of looms at C&W. Lying on my couch, I was taking tests with her across the street, worrying if this morning’s exam had indeed, as we had predicted, begun with this question or that. I was going back, sober, to college.

Seated at my new piano, I was always listening for the click at the door and the quick steps coming closer. At every car’s brake squeaking outside the house, my heart expected her, hours before I knew she could possibly return.

My own first public outing was to take place shortly before I resumed work at the department, under my new chief, Captain Mangum. I was asked to Easter services at the large stone church I had attended as a child, as a restless captive peering at the back of old Briggs Cadmean’s glossy skull, but that I had not entered since my father’s funeral. It was Alice who (to my mother’s delight) asked me to go to church with her.

Across from her at the kitchen table, I said, “Red MacLeod, Lenin is writhing.”

“Why?” she asked, and poured more syrup on her pancakes.

“I thought you were a Communist.”

“Wasn’t Christ? I’m a communist with a little
c
.” She smoothed the syrup in swirls with her knife. “Most Communists with a big
C
are just Fascists without the nice clothes.”

“Are you speaking as a weaver, or as a politician, or as a churchgoer?”

“All three,” she said, and began eating.

I watched her. “Alice, why don’t you marry me now and then run in this district primary? It might be nice to have a Christian communist state senator named Savile.”

She laughed, leaned over and kissed me, tilting the small, stubborn chin. “First of all, Mister Savile the Fifth, even if you do con me into marrying you next month, which is not practical, and not reasonable…”

“How about if I say, all right,
take
the damn sideboard out of the dining room, will that do it?”

“This sideboard is hideous. And second, if somebody out of this house goes to the senate, the name’s going to be MacLeod the First. Unless, of course, you want to run against me.”

“Ah
tempora
. You and Briggs.” I poured her a third cup of coffee. “You ought to get old Cadmean to finance your campaign. You’re one of his. He’d love to buy you…. Can you be bought?”

“Bought to do what? And for how much? I’m practical. So’s Cadmean. Just last week the union and he bought each other off. What he wanted to buy was ‘cooperation,’ and we sold it to him.”

“Meaning what?”

“Are you really interested?”

I was very interested.

“Well, Mr. Cadmean invited all the shop stewards to this special board meeting, where he got us to testify so the board would vote through his plans to put this new loom system in the cottons division. That’s my section. To update, instead of cut back. Now, that means shutting down for the time it takes to install the system, and then, after it goes in, laying off some workers.”

I put down my fork. “New loom system?”

“Okay, so why does the union agree to ‘cooperate’? Because, Mr. Cadmean makes a big tearjerker speech about how it’s better to lay off a few people now than to let the division get shut down completely because we keep running at a loss. Because if we have to shut down, everybody loses.” Alice cut some more squares of pancakes with quick sharp slices.

I asked, “Why should the union believe him?”

“Because there is a faction on the board fighting Cadmean to phase out the textiles completely; they want C&W to move more into their electronics; they want the plant space. And frankly, if they’re willing to give me assurances they’d pay to train the people now assembling their clothes so they could assemble their computers instead, that would be fine with me. But Mr. Cadmean comes out sounding like the great American philanthropist and making the board sound like heartless capitalist capital
P
pigs, and everybody gets choked up about loyalty to ‘the old mill,’ and fighting the Asain labor peril, and they vote him everything he wants. Why aren’t you eating your pancakes? Are you in pain again?” She looked at me seriously over her coffee cup.

I said, “Are you talking about a direct projection inertialloom system?”

Alice stared at me, her cup dark blue as her eyes. “Well, you’re always a surprise.” So was her boss.

•   •   •

Sunday night, rain thudded at the bedroom’s bay windows, and the big oak scratched at the glass, but to me wind and rain sounded peaceful as mist.

Unfastening her green robe, Alice said, “So, you think old Cadmean’s really going to show up tomorrow to see you? What do you think he wants?”

“He’s the one who made the appointment and what I think is, he’s too conceited to miss a chance to grandstand. But who knows what he wants, except he wants his daughter. And who knows what she wants, except to spite him. Good Christ, I can’t believe she turned Cuddy down.”

Alice slipped beneath the covers. “Justin, how many times do I have to tell you, Briggs didn’t say
no
. She told Cuddy, ‘Ask me again in a year.’”

I pulled myself up, careful of my leg. “Why? You don’t have to wait a year to
decide
if you love somebody. If you do, you do. Like us.”

She hugged against me, her cold nose on my chest, and wove her fingers through mine. “You’re not fair to Briggs. She has a lot of bad junk to sort through about her dad. I mean, to be sure that she’s not marrying somebody either because Cadmean doesn’t approve, or because he
does
. Plus, is it really
her
Cuddy wants, or is it marriage? And, Jesus Christ.” Her hair, scratchy silk, made goose bumps along my shoulder. “Who in our generation wouldn’t be at least a little ambivalent about marrying the local chief of police?”

“How about a local detective lieutenant?”

“That’s bad enough.”

But her mouth and her hands as she now slipped up over me was evidence beyond doubt that she and I were stubbornly, perfectly right.

She whispered, “Now, don’t hurt yourself again.”

“About that sideboard. We’ll haul it to the backyard. We’ll sprinkle it with the leftover cigarettes, and the leftover Jack Daniel’s, and set it on fire. Say yes.”

“Yes.”

She moved above me like a flower swayed, like white peonies and red poppies and rose mountain laurel swayed; and I was the new shafts of spring earth, and so joined with her that there was no way to tell what was earth growing up, and what was flower.

Easter Monday two letters came in the mail. Both were endings; one was also an inheritance. The first was a postcard from Susan Whetstone of a hotel swimming pool in St. Thomas. It bore neither salutation nor signature and was brief: “Why did you send those things back? You are so full of it.” Unless she’d already found someone else to give the gifts to, Lawry now had two of a number of expensive things, including a gold chain I had never worn, with the initials JBS.