The game soon bored kids. Who could prove Castalia wrong? She sat inside the sheeny pelts fed table scraps donated by my family and many others. No game is fun long if just one person’s cornered all right answers (I’d tried telling Captain that for years).
So our kids scattered after Cas warned, “Feed them by dropping just one peel at a time—you, don’t you lost that finger, got me?” Off mine dashed with Cassie’s youngests and the neighbor children. Minks are like professional beauties of the human type: staying pretty seems to use up most of their dispositions—not much kindness left. They wear their limited love right on their backs. Then people skin them for that love. I once asked Cassie if she minded wringing necks of all these beasts she’d raised. “Never met a mink I liked much—except to stroke ’em—which you can’t do till they done checked out. They ain’t pets, they beautiful excuses.—Talking furs, you ought to of seen Lady’s. Kept hers all in one cedar closet, used to have us bring up ice from out the icehouse in hottest August and only when the room got cold unto meat lockers would she try on one fur at a time. Let us do it, too. You learn to get accustomed. August, and your breath blowing white and you in snowman chinchilla, silver fox. One way of softening the world some.”
I confessed worrying: Captain’s toting Ned to some seaside duck blind for a overly male weekend. Cas disappointed me, saying the more I fought it, the more fun it’d seem to boys who will be … “Can I touch your coat?” I asked.
Out come a whole ringtail sleeve of her—stuffed full of flesh as dark as mink but smoother, harder. Seemed mink might make some fuzzy truce between Castalia’s cast-iron silhouette and the light air all round her. Up close, I again saw the coat’s sad imperfections. Twice in ten years she’d shifted its fastening frogs outward as her girth grew. Each expansion made a mark that caused her garment to look walleyed or scored with udders in twin rows. The skins grew lusher as the coat eased toward the floor—Cassie’d started throwing slaughterhouse fat to her more recent stock. Minks were out there making squealing rustles as our kids pelted them with leftovers. The beasts could strip a cow skull so clean so quick, you might practically sell the bone to some nice science class. “So pretty,” I touched fur, she nodded.
Her neckpiece in the 1880s had become a glass-eyed boa by the nineties, then a “chubby” by century’s arrival, falling to a wrap, a stole, then drooping towards the fabled glory of “full-length mink.” Though you saw how pelts were joined with fishing-line stitches peeping through, the coat still seemed Luxury itself. A log cabin of earned fluff, it covered her huffing all over town and in most weathers. Castalia didn’t trust the world enough to leave her coat alone at home, no, not even in August.
2
MY KIDS hated visiting Momma—she made them play board games, she set them in groupings here and there. They always claimed to have lots of homework waiting back home. So today we passed her place on tiptoe practically, me guilty: a only child trailing all these grandkid dividends. She sometimes acted jealous over the hours I spent at Castalia’s place. She once said, “What can you see in that obese bulldog wrapped with rats?” (I didn’t speak to her for six whole days.) But here comes my mother, and carrying a armful of hydrangea blooms, too blue to seem earth-grown. The more acid the dirt, the deeper your blue. Dressed in black, she had dark bags under her eyes (first sign of her undetected liver cancer), she was wearing a hint of cologne (unlike her), and she’d rushed right past both me and ours. Ignoring me, she interested me suddenly. She wore a crepe armband. I spoke into her homegrown flowers, “Who died?”
“Nobody that recent,” the bouquet shifted, I saw Momma’s softened face. My own mother looked different. People change. I believe this, even now.
“She would be a hundred and five today.” I figured Momma meant her own bland mother, Mrs. Angus McCloud, a woman everybody seems to’ve loved but nobody could ever make real to me in stories, the author of a shortbread recipe I’ve got to give you, a lady who had no motive or gumption past wishing for her family’s well-being, not enough. Not enough to make it into History.
“You never knew her, Lucille. I’ve lately come to see things a bit more clearly. It was most unfair—no doubt of that, quite dreadfully unjust. But blaming!—we all blame. Ugly in the extreme. Why is that, Lucille? We want a reason, I suppose, or—better—some culprit. But so little of value can actually be traced that way. I regret her losses. Along with Poppa’s love, it was she who got me through much early difficulty. And yet—sad, only on her hundred and fifth birthday do I get around to taking certain … tokens.”
Along with flowers, Momma held a little gift-boxed bottle of cologne. That’s what I’d smelled. Momma never wore scent, said it only courted harm.
“I dreamed of her. And in my dream it was her birthday. I had your father go check her stone and sure enough, today’s her hundred and fifth. My nurse loved me but couldn’t spare me any pain of note. We cannot save each other, Lucille. In regards to a certain man in your own life, dear, do remember that. We must let each other go down independently and that’s maybe why we come to detest each other so. We hate how much the others’ pain reminds us of our failing them, our likely going down as well.—’Basta.’ Probably sounds silly. I am off. She was ever the fool for birthdays.”
I turned and watched her rush, the notorious Bianca McCloud, acknowledged monster among all the virtuoso brats of Falls. How had time and tricks turned such a rogue into this skinny society lady veering past me, hiding behind flowers and trailing a flag of good cologne? Change, always so mysterious in people. I guess we should be grateful it can happen to most any of us anytime. Can’t it? Can’t it? Live and hope.
CAP was growing broader through his back. Though he’d been fifty when we married, the fellow was in right good shape—a little cello notch at the center where those first saddlebags of stored plumpness settle in the midst of mid-aged gents. But now his trunk thickened. If his chins’d doubled, trebled, the white-silver beard spared anybody’s seeing that. Only when he slipped into his nightshirt did I—the one on earth allowed to—notice how plump he’d grown from the extra water whiskey held. His cheeks got rosier. He was now looking—all the whole year round—like some vice-riddled Santa, drawing unemployment clear up till late fall, hard on the elves in the off-season. Darl, ain’t nobody more depressed than Santa between shifts. And yet, remembering, it was a good time, too—one of the last we had. When he was “up,” he kept slipping me fistfuls of twenties to buy groceries—back when a twenty seemed Gibraltar. He was rich as he would ever get. He only hit me once or twice for six whole months there. He quacked his mallard mating whistle around the house. That year and the next we had a genius mockingbird nesting in our black walnut where the kids’ swing hung. This creature could copy the duck call. Only the male mockingbirds sing, and they can “do” up to seventy-five songs but (like with all of us, darling) a few repeats. I soon heard this bird do a cat in heat, a window fan, and the first half-bar of what I swear was Rudy Vallee’s latest, “I’m Just a Vagabond Lover.” Bird also did other birds. They’d answer, thinking he was one of them. Cas sat with me in the back yard one August evening, shucking corn. Our kids were gathered—her youngests and all mine. The genius bird was tearing through every local color. Cas heard Captain’s decoy mallard-call decoyed. She coughed one of her un-laughs, said, “Who can’t that Xerxes do to pieces?”
“‘Who can’t that Xerxes do to pieces?’” I gave right back.
“That ain’t me Luce done done,” Cas defended herself.
“Is, too,” her own daughter nodded. “Just like.”
Louisa confessed then, “Momma, while doing dishes especially, she practices you, Cassie.”
I faced my victim and inspiration. “Someday I want to tell The Tribe That Answers just like you do.”
She give me this look I cannot describe. “Best do it right then, or not a bit.”
I only nodded. We turned back to detasseling corn. We listened. Evening fell on one bird doing everybody’s mu
sic.
3
RUTH, a abandoned wife, twenty-nine years old, lived right next door. The mockingbird did her Rudy Vallee record. Ruth’s husband had gone alone by train (on his railroad worker’s discount) to Washington, D.C., to see the April cherry blossoms. Turned out, Willard liked them cherry blossoms so much he wrote Ruth: He felt a yen to stay right on till their next pink go-round. “You don’t mind, I know,” his postal card said. Poor Ruth brought the thing over, showed me it while smiling out her worry. “It’s a pretty card,” she said, like its attractiveness mattered. “That darn Willard. Some dreamer,” she said twice, then left. I sent over some of my famous Scottish shortbread in time for poor Ruth’s dinner. Have I given you the recipe for that? I have to give you that before we’re done, remind me.
Willard never mentioned how Ruth might get along till spring next arrived in D.C. Lucky for her, she had a little money of her own. Her mother’s people had been Pomeroys, though it didn’t show. She stayed put and smoked and, from her quiet porch, watched me gather all of the Captain’s growing mail, invitations to “appear.” She seemed to think her strapping Willard wrote us, not her. Ruth daily waited for the postman or Spring, whichever got here first. She waved over at me, poor thing, she called, “Guess who’s having a very juicy lamb chop for dinner?”
“You?” I tried being polite but she broke my heart, Ruth. Ordered stuff by mail order, just to give her something extra to look out for, postally speaking. Like my poppa, poor Ruth was addicted to the mail. Like Pop, she got little. Still, it’s one of Falls’ joys that makes us like most other spots. True, our local bedsheets always needed changing, and so did the program at our moving pictures. True, this year’s fashion was last year’s, let out a inch with one tired flounce more—but Falls at least got recognized by the U.S. Postal Service, receiving some six days per week. Made you feel more here.
A radio turned to Mary Worth. A Victrola rigged with tangos, a carton of Luckies with three clean ashtrays: Ruth set up shop on her front porch near the mail basket. She got out there around 9 a.m. sharp though our delivery won’t till one-thirty to two. Willpower might bring her strapping Willard home. “Poor Ruth,” even our kids called her that.
Every time she drifted past one of our town’s three competitive hair-cooking establishments, beauticians rushed to their windows, stared out at her, longing. Lolly couldn’t pin a curl for minutes after.
“I’d pay her, Lucy. Love a challenge. I hate to say it about another woman in my hometown, and I remember that her Willard was nice across the shoulders but otherwise no great shakes, but no wonder he left. I can see Poor Ruth’s split ends from fifteen feet—they’re ‘tridents.’ ‘Tridents’ is trade talk, Lucy, it means you got one hair in a three-way tie of splitting. I have dreams and in my dreams, they’ve turned to three-headed snakes and are underfoot everywhere in Falls. I kill them with a pitchfork that’s my favorite silver styling brush, only huge and barbed like frog gigs are. Send Poor Ruth to Lolly for help, free. On Le Palais. My civic duty to a town this size. Her and her hair are everywhere.”
Waiting for Willard, Ruth installed our block’s number one telephone. Maybe she hoped he’d call. She got her own name listed every possible way—maiden name, initials. Helped flesh out Falls’ early phone directory, Ruth’s moniker tridenting too. Poor thing tattled on my own children over our shared fence. I’d go out with yet another eighty pounds of wet clothes and Ruth’d say, “I worry about the twins going down that drainage ditch again. Maybe it’s just me.”
“It is,” I said under my breath. I knew I was supposed to rush around like a chicken. I was supposed to beg to be led to the drainage sump hole where my matched set was gasping, maybe stuck. But I had explored that same death trap as a Runt Funny child. “They usually come home,” I said. Then felt I’d hurt Ruth’s feelings.
Willard had worked for the Atlantic Coastline Railroad like half the folks in Falls. His job was he signaled train-to-train, first with kerosene lanterns, then—as modern times hit—with twelve-battery flashlights.
One night, my Baby admitted she had lost her new Junior Princess wristwatch I had paid much more than I should’ve at Woolworth’s for her birthday. Missing it, she was crushed, I saw that, Baby doing her Katharine Cornell dramatics about how she’d never sleep till it was found. She lisped, tragic, “Baby’s best ac-cethory, ever.” She’d been near our swing out back. So I grabbed the kitchen flashlight. I kept the Eveready in the (hairnet) drawer nearest our back door.
So I’m out there by the fence on my hands and knees. Baby’s been forced to wait at the back screen door, where she’s just whimpering for it, and I’m aiming my flash at the scuffed spots that hold puddles under our swing set, when I hear a whisper.
“Willard? lover? that you?”
I felt bad telling Poor Ruth, no, just Lucy seeking Baby’s Junior Princess Accessory watch.
“Oh,” she said. It was the sound of a soul going down a long sliding board towards nothing. “Oh,” she tried brightening. “Thought it could be. That Willard, he does dearly love a flashlight.” And she drooped toward her big empty house.
“Night …” I called, and watched her go. I heard her Victrola crank up loud to help her through the evening. I thought: At least I ain’t alone. Times I long to be, but having Poor Ruth right here, it proved to me—this life would have to get worse before I’d really leave.—I’d thought of leaving. Did I say that?
From next door, Ruth watched me flip through a stack of mail for Cap, post-Raleigh speaking offers so fancy they called the fees “honorariums,” like he was some Roman emperor. From half of Dixie, they poured in. Was it jealousy I felt?
The Elks, the Lions, the United Mooses. Cap was now welcome by every form of club wildlife. I thought it fitting that these men chose to be known as types of missing animals. Imagine naming yourself for exactly what you’ve gone and shot the last of. Falls even had a club called the Lodge of Redmen.
Momma claimed our family failing was: jealousy and self-pity. I have been known to cave in to self-pity. Nobody’s perfect, all right? But maybe this I was feeling, with two pounds of male mail in my hand, was that other: Old Jealousy.
And—a hard thing to admit: The more of a celebrity he started being to the world, the more motorcars we got with state flags on their running boards, the more motorcycled State Police turned up before dawn to escort hunting expeditions clear down to the beach—sirens making everything including ambulances pull over—the more of a moving-picture star he expected even us to feel he was, the more some part of me believed he was becoming, well, cheesy. Tacky, he’d started turning. Here he was lending money to wealthy poker pals. Imagine, me falling for this fellow. But, hateful as it is to say, I did, I had.
Once, I went to lift his civvy vest off a chair back around then, I jabbed myself on something sharp. Really sliced my palm. From one pocket, I pull forth this little curved metal barb. Was a lethal-looking doohickey, thorn-shaped, three and a half inches long, bright silver as some dental pick. Two leather thongs tied onto it, like laces of something you might wear. Seemed a cross between hypodermic needle and the nastiest brass knuckle ever.
Having scratched my palm, I stood staring at my open hand, like some fortune-teller finally measuring her own artery Life line. Red beads, a new seam. Alone in our quiet bedroom, I said, “Lucy, I see rubies in your future.”
His shirts lately required extra bleaching, speckled with small rusty flecks. He stepped up behind me now, unexpected, silent, home for lunch. When he touched my back, I jumped like somebody shot. He saw what I held. He grabbed the thing, tucked it behind him. He stood here, a foot taller than myself, giving me this guilty pluckish smile, straight down. Whiskers, still tinted parade blue, widened like some tomcat’s.
“What cut me?” I asked. Typical, my curiosity coming on account of bodily damage, my body, and afterward.
“Equipage from a recent sideline, Lucille—game fowls. You see, this gets strapped onto a fighting cock’s legs. Al
lows the victor to achieve his end more decisively.”
Downstairs, I heard Ned and Louisa start bickering over a nickel. She was money-mad and always saving.
“Sir, you mean that makes this one chicken quicker to slice off the poor loser’s head?”
“Something along those lines, my dove. You do have a way with words, don’t you, Lucy?” and he laughed like a boy caught shoplifting, a boy whose daddy owns the store. “Do wrap something around that hand, I worry about you. And next time be more careful in sneaking through my pockets? No telling what might turn up.”
“I’ll ignore that. And them dark specks on your white shirts? Just dried rooster blood, hunh? They fling it off in such amounts, do they? and you’re right there up front with a fistful of bills, egging them on, I bet. You enjoy that, sir?”
“Everything sounds rough when flattened that way, Lucille. Everything does. The sexual act, bravery, everything can be reduced as you’ve just done. And you have a gift for doing that, I fear. It’s your fable-making. Ironing out certain distinctions. There’s so much I’d like to explain to you, really. But so little I actually can, you know? Lately you resist the best parts of me. Maybe the age difference. I don’t know. But fun is one thing you never seem to get. Two different languages seemingly. And what I keep trying to make clear, it’s probably nobody’s fault. I mean that. Here, come here …”