Sweet Water

  He nodded. “Now I hear Harold and June Watkins want to buy it, expand their barbecue business.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me.” She cut out another coupon. “They’re greedy people. Can’t be contented with what they’ve got.”

  Horace shook his head energetically, his mouth full of grits. “You can’t say that, Ma! That’s what’s so darn special about this country. If I told my kids once I told them a hundred times, what you want is here for the asking. You just got to work a little, that’s all.”

  “Well, those people are vultures, if you ask me. Waiting until a man’s down and going after all he’s got.”

  “They probably saved him from bankruptcy.”

  “It’s not Christian.”

  Horace stood up. He took his cap off and put it back on. “They just want to make a living like everybody else. God bless ‘em if they do a better job of it.”

  “I’ll never eat there,” she muttered.

  “Well, Cassandra, you ready to see that old barn up there on the hill? I got about an hour to show you the place.” Horace looked at his watch. “Just under an hour. We better get moving.”

  “I’ll be out when you get back,” Clyde said without looking up. She shuffled the coupons into a neat pile. “I’ll leave the garage open.”

  I followed him to his car, a green Buick Le Sabre, and he opened the passenger door for me. The plush gray interior smelled of musk. When Horace got in he leaned over confidentially and said, “We all wear seat belts in this neck of the woods.” He sat back and buckled up, and I did too. “Lots of kids around here get their license and start drinking at the same time. They say there’s not much else to do. Next thing you know, they’ve gone and got themselves killed, and probably killed somebody else in the process.” He pulled out of the driveway, looking over his shoulder. His suit jacket hung open awkwardly, stretched tight at the armpit.

  “Same in New York, except with semiautomatics,” I said.

  “So I heard.” He was driving with his left hand, his right arm dangling across the top of the seat. “How do you like it down here so far? About what you expected?”

  I thought for a moment. “I didn’t know what to expect. I was surprised when I saw supermarkets—I guess I thought there’d be a general store with barrels of sugar candy and bolts of cotton behind the cash register.”

  He grinned. “Wait till you see the Fair Oaks Mall. They’ve got escalators and everything.”

  “I passed it yesterday with Alice. Eighty-nine stores.”

  “And a Food Court.” He slowed for a red light, looked both ways, and glided through it. “What about Clyde? You getting along okay with her? She giving you a hard time?”

  “We’re getting along fine.”

  “Well, that’s good,” he said. “‘Cause, whoo-ee, she can be tough to deal with.”

  Out my side window, fields were flashing by: rich red dirt, lush green crops, the occasional scarecrow in the distance. I could see farmers riding tractors, testing the soil. Clusters of cows dotted the sloping hills in the distance like flocks of birds. Though it was early, the sun was hot.

  “She wasn’t always like this,” Horace was saying. “Must be her age or something turned her cranky. She used to have the sweetest disposition you ever saw.” He flipped the sun visor down and up again, then reached over my legs to the glove compartment and retrieved a pair of sunglasses. “You know, she loved your mama like nobody else. I think she would’ve given her own life if she could’ve saved Ellen’s.”

  “Really?”

  “I don’t think she ever got over it.”

  We sat in silence for a few miles.

  “Yesterday we were looking at old photos and she got kind of upset,” I said. “I was asking some questions, and she—she acted like I was attacking her or something.”

  “Pictures of your mama?”

  “Yes.”

  He shook his head. “Ellen’s death just tore her up. I think for her it’s as fresh as if it happened yesterday.”

  We pulled off the road onto a dirt drive marked by a wooden stake. Horace told me that the turnoff was exactly four and a half miles past the intersection of 622 and Briarcliff Road, on Briarcliff going south. “You’ll know when you’re close because of that big old sign for the Cooperative Tire Center we just passed on the left,” he explained.

  The drive was overgrown with grass and lined with orange and yellow wildflowers. A gully ran alongside it, and beyond was a stand of trees. After about five hundred yards the trees thinned out, and we wound up an incline to the left. As we reached the top I could see a large white house sitting alone on the next rise, with the deep-rutted drive leading up to it.

  “Well, there it is,” he said, pointing as if he wasn’t sure I’d seen it.

  From a distance the two-story structure looked solid and imposing, even grand, as if still inhabited by a prosperous family. As we got closer, though, I could see the results of years of neglect: the screen door hanging against the frame, one-hinged; broken windows on either side; peeling paint. Tall dry grasses, wild and yellow-green, poked up through banister spokes and porch slats.

  “What’s wrong with that dang door?” Horace said, peering out the windshield. “I swear, every time I come out here there’s something new to fix.”

  He stopped the car and we got out. Beer bottles and crumpled cigarette packages littered the ground near the front steps. Horace told me that local kids had been coming up here to get into trouble late at night. They weren’t bad kids, just mischievous, but he’d see to it that this kind of activity stopped right away. We made our way to the porch, Horace kicking at bottles with the side of his shoe. He had assumed a resigned air, as if he was showing me the place against his will.

  “Nobody says you got to live here, you know. And I, for one, won’t blame you a bit if you decide to let me get rid of the place for you and put some money in your pocket. I’m sure we could sell it in a handshake. This is prime land.”

  He tested the steps one by one, holding out his arm to keep me back until he was sure they were safe. Making his way across the porch, he jumped on each slat first with his right foot, then with his left, like he was tap-dancing in slow motion. When he got to the screen door he moved it aside cautiously and tilted it so it leaned against the house. Waving me over, he took out his keys.

  “Got to put new panes in these,” he said, nodding his head toward the windows, “but otherwise, so far so good. The inside should be just as Clyde left it.”

  The door swung inward, and we were in a dim hallway. To the right I could see the kitchen, to the left a large room with furniture piled up in it. Straight ahead the hall narrowed and a staircase led to the second floor. I wandered slowly into the kitchen, with Horace following. It was narrow and bare except for an old white refrigerator with rounded corners, a gas stove, and a porcelain sink set into a built-in counter that ran the length of the wall. The wallpaper, curling at the edges and faded from the sun, was pale yellow. A window above the sink faced the drive. The room smelled faintly of pine.

  Horace examined the refrigerator and told me he thought it should work fine. He pointed to electrical outlets and tried the water faucets and the stove, which needed to be hooked up. He opened all the cupboards and drawers and, crouching down, ran a finger along the baseboard. “You like cats? Might want to get one,” he said. “There’s a nest of mice in here somewhere.”

  The ground floor was designed so that each room led into the next: kitchen, dining room, living room, hall. I followed Horace through the large dining room, where he pointed out a dusty gold-and-crystal chandelier and a large cherrywood sideboard. In the adjoining living room he showed me the carved mahogany fireplace Amory had found at an abandoned plantation near Knoxville. With no shades or curtains, the rooms were brilliant with sunlight.

  Back in the kitchen again, Horace opened the door to the base-ment. We went downstairs and he explained the fuse box, the water heater, how to check for gas leaks.


  At the landing on the way to the second floor I stumbled over a stuffed animal, badly worn and missing an eye. I picked it up.

  “That was Ralph’s. Must’ve been left in the moving.” Horace took it from me and rubbed its ear between his fingers. “He used to carry this thing everywhere.” He dropped it and continued up the stairs.

  “What’s Ralph doing now?” I asked.

  “He says he’s an actor, but as far as I can tell he’s just waiting tables.” His voice was clipped. “He’s sharing an apartment in Atlanta with another cousin of yours.”

  “I know—Troy.”

  “Yeah. They both have what you might call abnormal life-styles. I guess Troy’s in some kind of band.”

  “Have you ever been down there to visit?”

  “No.” Horace looked at his watch. “I’m about out of time. Let’s get a move on.”

  We glanced around the second floor, one bathroom and three bedrooms filled with box springs and mattresses and bureaus. I asked Horace to show me the room that had been my mother’s, and he led me into a bedroom in the southwest corner, with windows on both sides. “Twin beds,” he said, pointing to two walls. “Ellen and Elaine had to share. I got my own room, of course, being the only boy.” He motioned toward a dark walnut bedframe with a carved headboard leaning against the wall. “I believe Elaine took her bed for Alice. That must be your mother’s.”

  I went over and ran my hand slowly along one of the uprights. It was covered with dust, but the wood was smooth.

  “If you want to use it, all you need is a mattress.” He grinned. “Of course, that’d be assuming you weren’t expecting visitors. A single bed is awful small.”

  On the way downstairs Horace said he’d send somebody over to fix the screen door. He measured the broken windows for glass and jumped up and down on a few more boards. He told me who to call for plumbing and gas and electricity.

  As we stood on the front porch I thanked him for showing me around. “I know it must be strange for you,” I said. “I mean, it’s your house. You grew up here.”

  “I never liked it much. It was too small for the five of us.”

  “But still. All the memories you must have—”

  “Ma hated this place. She felt trapped out here in the country with nobody around except us kids. They fought about it all the time.” He laughed a little, removing and replacing his cap. “As for the memories, I’d just as soon forget.”

  “There must’ve been some good times,” I insisted.

  “Well, sure. Christmases were generally pretty nice, as I recall. I used to like to hunt out there in those woods.” He leaned against the porch railing. “To be honest, though, I try not to think about the past too much. There’s no sense in dwelling on things you can’t change.”

  I nodded, running my toe along a crack between the wooden slats.

  “What’s done is done.”

  I heard an edge in his voice and looked up.

  “Cassandra—I don’t know how to say this. It’s just … well …”

  “What?”

  “I’d hate to see you looking for something that isn’t here.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I don’t know. Whatever it is you packed up and came down here looking for.”

  “But—”

  “You got to understand, we don’t talk about Ellen,” he said. “We don’t talk about what happened. Your being here—well, you stir up memories folks are still trying to forget. It’s not your fault—that’s just the way it is. So what I’m saying is, what’s over is over. Ellen’s dead. That’s all there is to it.”

  “So what you’re saying is, don’t ask any questions. Leave well enough alone.”

  Horace shrugged, looking down into the yard, his hands in his pockets. After a moment he wheeled around and started down the steps to the car. “You could say that. Come on, I’ll drop you back home.”

  part

  three

  It is somewhere in that house. He buried it somewhere the same week we buried Ellen. I tried to find it but it was all he had left and he wouldn’t give it up. He wanted Cassandra to find it. I’m sure he thought that if she found it she would forgive him, though what difference that makes now is beyond me. In the years of silence and then of waiting I searched when he wasn’t looking, under floorboards, behind furniture, tapping the walls for hollow spaces, scanning for new nails. Sometimes I wondered if he took the pages one by one and burned them, until nothing was left but ash; sometimes I speculated that he threw the box into the reservoir, the pages inside bloating like dead skin, ink seeping into the water like blood from a wound. But I knew him too well, and I knew he couldn’t die with what he knew. He hated keeping secrets.

  And maybe he really loved that woman; I don’t know. Maybe he would have left me for her if he’d had any backbone at all. She might have gone the way of all the rest if he had been more careful or if she had been someone else. But he was terrible at keeping secrets, and he had a fatal habit of forgetting that some things aren’t meant to be found out, not ever. He went and destroyed our child and then he was destroyed himself, and both of us had to live with all those lies and truths until the end. I had been the one, always, to suffer for his sins, but now things were different. He learned what it meant to feel pain. He learned what it meant, but he’d never had to build up a resistance to it, so it broke him.

  I moved into the old house the day after Horace took me to see it. When I left Clyde’s she was quiet, as closed and expressionless as a cat. She acted as if we might never see each other again and it didn’t particularly matter. She waved me off quickly and went back inside.

  “She’s never been much for goodbyes,” Horace said, shrugging. “She’s just that way.”

  He started his car, and I got into the station wagon to follow him. I didn’t look back to see if she was at the kitchen sink, but I imagined her standing there. I thought I could feel her eyes on me. But I didn’t feel bad. I don’t like goodbyes either.

  I spent the first few days cleaning and scrubbing, the smell of ammonia constantly in my nose. The wooden staircase and banister were coated with a sticky film; the wallpaper was faded and dirty. Scouring the kitchen linoleum on my hands and knees, I discovered that the floral pattern was blue and red, not the blue-green and pink it originally appeared to be. The bathrooms—one upstairs, one down—were fairly clean, but the pipes were rusted and none of the plumbing worked. Until the plumber came on the third day I had to haul water from an old pump two hundred yards from the house and go outside to pee.

  By the second day the telephone and answering machine I’d brought from New York were hooked up and ready to use. The phone sat on the floor of the living room like a turtle in its shell. I couldn’t bring myself to call anyone. I knew I could never convince people that I liked it here and things were fine, because even as I mouthed the words to myself they sounded hollow. I was fine, but I was lonely, and it was the kind of loneliness that crept through phone lines, permeated the pages of a letter. It was what everyone expected, what they were looking for. So I kept my distance.

  I guess if I’d tried I could have told them about the view from the dining room windows, down a slope covered with tiger lilies and the odd mountain ash to a tiny pond in front of a stand of trees. I might have described how in the mornings as I lay in bed the slope outside my window would be covered with a sheet of dew, glistening in the sunlight, glinting through the rain. I might have attempted to convey what I felt when sometimes, late at night, I thought I could see shadows of people from long ago and hear voices echoing in the darkness. And how, in the morning it seemed like everything had been swept clean.

  But I just wasn’t ready to tell anyone any of these things. So I held onto my loneliness, almost as a shield, and the phone stayed silent.

  By the evening of the third day I was ready for contact. “Do you want to hear about the ants?” I asked my dad, flopping down on the bed.

  I thought I’d never get rid of th
em. Three hours after I scrubbed the kitchen with disinfectant and sprayed with insecticide they’d be back, a few at a time, and before long the place would be swarming again. Finally, in desperation, I called an exterminator, who discovered an enormous and well-established colony under the floorboards behind the refrigerator. Two hours and forty-five dollars later, the ants were gone.

  “If I have to,” he said.

  I kicked off my sneakers and adjusted the phone on my shoulder.

  “Well, Horace warned me about the mice, but they were easy. I put flour on the floor and traced them to the dining room, and then all I had to do was sprinkle poison against the baseboard.”

  “Brilliant detective work.”

  “I thought so, but it’s kind of disgusting. I have to wear sneakers all the time to avoid the dead ones. I’ve been finding them all over the place with white dust on their noses, like little coke addicts.”

  “Charming.”

  “Then I found these incredible birds’ nests hanging from the rafters on the front porch. Great big circles of droppings underneath. And it’s so sad, sometimes the little baby birdies, birdlings, whatever they’re called—”

  “Chicks.”

  “Right. Anyway, they fall out before they can fly, and they land on the porch—”

  “I get the idea.”

  “Yeah. So I took down the nests. But I put up a birdhouse I found in the basement, and they seem to like that.”

  “So-o-o—what about the ants?”

  “I was just getting to them,” I said. When I paused I could hear his patience hanging on the line between us. “You’re not bored, are you, Dad?”

  “Oh, no, Cassie. No, no, no.”

  I sighed. “This is important, Dad. I’m taking control here. This is a new thing for me.”

  “Didn’t you have cockroaches in Brooklyn?”