Maybe that's what I hated the most. Maybe that's why I asked Miss Ella if Katie could sleep over one last time before summer ended. Maybe that's why we had spent the whole day in a deserted rock quarry. Maybe that's why we rolled that boat down here and let it sink to the bottom, knowing full well we'd never get it back. Maybe I needed them to help protect me from the one demon I couldn't escape. Now the day was spent and my demon was ever-present.
I looked down into the water and saw the aluminum boat resting gently on the sandy bottom forty feet below. I nodded. That boat marked the day. I jumped into the water and swam below, pulling at the water. I grabbed the oarlocks and held myself to the bottom, just looking at the boat, listening to the quiet, and feeling the safety of the water. When I started seeing stars, I let go and pushed up. I had what I wanted. Proof that it had happened. And I wanted proof of today because it was the best day.
The best day ever.
Following that day, Katie and I fell in love-in the innocent way that kids do. For four years, we passed notes, called each other on the phone, held hands when nobody was looking, and watched each other grow through the discomfort and promise of puberty, which she hit first.
While I chased baseballs around the backyard, Katie polished the keys on the piano. Every time she came over, Miss Ella led her by the hand to Rex's grand and said, "Sweet Katie, the prettiest noises ever to come out of that piano do so after your fingers touch the keys. So touch them." Sometimes, Katie would play for an hour. And when she did, the look on Miss Ella's face told me all the world was right. Katie's fingers would dance up and down the ivory keys, and happiness would filter through the rafters of Waverly like someone had flipped a switch.
Problem was, it could be flipped off too.
The week prior to our first school dance, the commer cial real estate field opened up in Atlanta and Katie's dad moved the family to a little suburb called Vinings. He bought a house on top of a hill where Sherman had stood and watched Atlanta burn. As their station wagon followed the moving truck out of town, I walked to the end of the driveway, stood at the gate, and waved. It looked like a funeral procession with my heart nailed down in a pine box in the back. Katie peered through the window, waved with one hand, tried to smile, and blew a kiss that never reached me. I leaned against the gate, my face pressed against the bars, and watched the station wagon fade into the distance as loneliness sunk through me like a rock.
I waved, acted strong, and as soon as they disappeared from sight, I walked off toward the quarry and cried until Miss Ella found me curled up beneath the zip lines. She sat down, rested my head in her lap, and brushed the hair out of my face until I quit shaking. She didn't say a word. She didn't have to. And, when I looked up, she was crying too.
A week later I learned the truth. Rex was holed up in his office consummating his latest deal with his newest best friend. I was lying on the floor, my ear pressed into the grate of the air vent, listening to the conversation through the vents that led from the floor of my room into Rex's office. I cared less for what he said and more for how he said it. The how was my way of knowing which side of Rex would exit his office-the bad or worse side. We could handle bad, but it was the worse one that usually hurt. Listening through the grate was my way of taking his pulse. If he started using more cuss words than not or making promises he didn't intend to keep, then I'd slide down the banister and find a way to get Miss Ella out of the house until he either cooled off or passed out, hopefully the latter.
With my ear pressed to the grate, I heard the other man ask, "Heard you hired a local real estate developer to head your office in Atlanta. Made him a pretty good deal."
"Yeah," Rex said above the tinkle of ice in his glass, "that's what he thinks." Another pour, a few more pieces of ice, and a controlled sip. "Had to relocate him and"another sip-"his daughter, if you know what I mean."
The other man laughed below his breath. "Your son found him a sweet young thing?"
Rex got up and walked to the window, where he could survey his world. I craned my ear, sliding the lobe into the grate. "If my eldest boy is going to grow up and saddle the horse that I sired, then he's got to toughen up. Mason Enterprises can't be run by a man who gets weak in the knees at the first young thing to come along. Not even at this age." Another sip. "Got to nip that in the bud now, and when he gets older he'll learn the real reason to keep a woman around."
They laughed. "Yeah," Rex said over the practiced striking of the match that lit his Cuban, "I almost feel sorry for the guy. He'll arrive in Atlanta with his happy family who think they've finally found the American dream. He'll work a couple of weeks with a grin on his face, and then he'll find himself under investigation for stealing fifty grand from Mason Enterprises. Not to mention the half-dressed woman he'll find waiting in his office when my attorneys arrive to explain his options." Rex laughed above the inhalation. "Let's just say it won't look real good for a devoted family man." Another pause and Rex's voice lowered. "And when I offer him a deal to disappear and take his sweet young thing with him, he'll tuck and run north. Shouldn't cost me but ten or fifteen grand."
"Guess she really had her little hooks in your boy."
"Better to tear them out now," Rex said. "Do him good to get a few scars on his heart. Make a man out of him."
That's when it hit me. I raised my head, looked through the vent, smelled the cigar smoke, and for the first time in my life, knew what death smelled like.
Chapter 9
I REACHED INTO MY WAISTBAND AND TOOK OUT THE revolver. I opened the cylinder again, then handed it to her, butt first. They toweled off while I built a fire. In the kitchen, I turned on the gas line to the stove and lit the burner. Finding tea bags in the cabinet, I put on a kettle of water in case she wanted tea.
"Katie, I've been traveling a week. I'm so tired I can't see straight. But you're welcome to stay here. Whatever you're running from, it won't find you here. Between these four walls is the safest place on earth."
"I remember," she whispered. She dried her son's hair and then her own, which was cropped short. She looked like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music without the smile or song. She knelt next to her son and pushed his bangs out of his eyes. `lase" -she looked up at me-"this is my friend Tucker."
I knelt down and held out my hand. "My friends call me Tuck." He cowered behind Katie. The friendly kid I had met at Bessie's was now scared out of his mind. "That's all right. When I was your age, most grown-ups scared me too."
I walked to the front door and Katie followed. "Are you going to call the police?" she asked.
"Do I need to?" She shook her head, and her shoulders relaxed to an almost-normal tilt. "Maybe we can talk about it tomorrow." It had been a long time since I'd seen Katie, but my guess was that if she was guilty of anything, it was of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I pointed to the front door. "I'm going over to that ostentatious-looking house just across that granite walkway, then I'm falling down the steps to the basement and into my bed. And I don't plan on getting up with the sun. Your car is cooked and you probably know as well as I that there's not a mechanic within twenty miles of this house. Even if they were up and open for business, I doubt if they'd know how to fix a Volvo. But if you want to steal something to make your getaway, the tractor's in the barn."
"Thank you," she whispered through a half-smile, holding back the tears. Jason raised his head over the sofa and clung to the pillow with both hands. I wasn't wearing a hat, but I looked at him, motioned like I was tipping my hat, and said, "'Night, pardner."
Jason smiled and tipped his baseball cap.
"Tomorrow, maybe we'll take some more pictures." He smiled more widely and Katie looked confused. "It's a long story. Tomorrow."
I opened the door and stepped underneath the front porch. Katie followed me, her face a collage of fear, anxiety, and relief.
I walked across the porch, wet and creaking under my weight, and Katie stood in the doorway, searching for the wor
ds. Swirling with questions myself, I turned around and said, "Why here? After all this time?"
She shrugged and shook her head. "I don't know. But every time I flipped my blinker or looked at the map, Clopton looked like it was lit with a spotlight or yellow highlighter."
I walked out into the rain, too tired to make sense of the whole thing. I wanted a soft bed, silence, and about ten hours of sleep.
Whenever I got tired, when my eyes almost shut themselves, I'd remember Miss Ella lying up in the bed with Mutt and me and reading to us out of her Bible. One night when we were still young enough to wear pajamas with feet on them, I was tired and just didn't feel like listening, so I said, "Miss Ella, why do you read to us? I don't understand half that stuff."
She squinted one eye like she was thinking about her response. She walked over to the window where you could see most of Waverly and the accompanying grounds. It was a good perch. She said, "You boys come here." We slid off the bed and walked to the window while she waved her hand across the landscape. "You see all that?"
We nodded.
"All that, everything you see, looks orderly. The walls are straight, the corners are square, the buildings and terraces are level, and everything around here has an order to it. You see that?"
We nodded again, more confused than ever.
"That's because it was built in relation to a plumb line." She reached into her pocket and pulled out a brass engineer's plumb. "See, the engineers take this, hang it from a string, and that point, that place on the earth where it hangs, becomes the plumb from which everything else is built or measured. Without that point, that place, there's no order to nothing. It's just chaos. The plumb"-she waved it in front of our faces-"is the starting point, the beginning and the end, the ..."
Mutt broke in. "The alpha and omega?"
Miss Ella smiled. "Yes, honey." We jumped back in bed and she patted her Bible. "I'm trying to build you boys up straight ..." She paused, thinking for a minute. "With strong walls, square corners, and able to stand when the storms come. But I can't do it without a plumb line. So"she patted the pages again gingerly-"this is it. Our reading at night is so that-"
I interrupted her. "So we end up like you and not like Rex."
She shook her head. "No, child. So you end up like the men in this book. I ain't fit to be included in these pages. Ain't fit to untie the laces of their sandals."
Walking across the backyard through the rain, I remembered Miss Ella patting the pages and whispering, "Ain't fit at all."
I grabbed Whitey's two jugs, walked in the back door of Waverly, and went down the spiral staircase into the basement. I had no intention of getting tanked, but I didn't want them to spontaneously combust and blow up my truck. A good truck is hard to find. On the other hand, if they blew up the house, I'd pull up a chair and watch. Maybe even sell tickets.
When Rex built the house, he sunk the spiral staircase into the basement to allow quick kitchen access to storage, kindling wood, kerosene, and certainly, booze. Whenever he gave a tour of the house, he started in the basement next to his two-hundred-bottle dust collector. I landed in the basement and let my eyes adjust to the dark. Then I skirted the wine cellar and shuffled over to my bed, sliding Whitey's jugs beneath it.
On my bedside table, I kept three things: a picture of Miss Ella sitting on a bucket next to the barn which I had taken before she got sick; her Bible-tattered, dusty, and imprinted with the foreheads she had thumped with it; and that brass plumb.
"No ma'am," I said out loud. "I don't know what they're doing or why." I pulled the ceiling fan cord, setting it to "cyclone," and fell onto the pillow. "You know everything I do. Probably more." I pulled the cold sheets up around my neck and closed my eyes. "I'm just glad she can't shoot."
Despite her sermonizing, Miss Ella never took us to church. Not really. Not with a building, choir, pews, and a pastor. Rex would have beaten her silly. I remember I was still in kindergarten the first time she got her nerve up and tried to take us to church. He spotted us in the car from a second-story window. We were dressed up and buckled in with excitement and curiosity pasted across our faces. It was almost like an adventure. In truth, and given the fact that it was a black Cadillac, we probably looked like we were going to a funeral. Rex ran outside in his robe, hair sticking up, face bloated, eyes bloodshot, screaming as she backed out the drive. She stopped, rolled down the window, and said, "Yes sir, Mr. Rex? You want to go with us?"
He almost yanked her out of the front seat. "Woman, where do you think you're going?"
"Mr. Rex, why, don't you know what day it is?" Rex was still foggy, and even though it was close to eleven in the morning, he probably couldn't have passed a Breathalyzer test. He held on to the side of the car, steadying himself while perspiration began beading across his forehead. "Mr. Rex, it's Easter." Miss Ella pointed to the yard. "Can't you see all the lilies?" Months ago, Mose had given Miss Ella some of his own money to plant rows of lily bulbs in the front yard. He'd even spent part of a Sunday afternoon with us putting them in the ground. That morning they had opened and looked like a hundred tiny bugles all blowing toward heaven.
"Woman, I don't give two cents ..." Spit formed in the corner of Rex's mouth as he reached through the car window and gripped her around the collar, choking her airway.
"But, Mr. Rex, I asked you last night while you were eating dinner-"
He tightened his grip again. "I don't give a rat's butt what day it is. You will NOT, NOT EVER"-he was screaming now-"take those boys to church." He pulled her face out the driver's window and glared into her eyes. His knuckles grew white, and a vein popped out on the side of his head. "You understand me, woman?"
"Yes sir, Mr. Rex."
Rex threw her back inside the car, straightened his robe, and quickly walked over to the lilies, where he stomped as many as he could. He turned in circles, making wide, swathlike arcs with his feet, cutting down everything he touched. He looked like a kid on the playground having a temper tantrum after the teacher told him not to climb on the jungle gym. Breathing heavily and peeling sticky lily petals off his robe, he walked back inside and Miss Ella gently eased the car back into the garage, trying not to let us see her crying. I can remember hearing her sniff beneath the sound of the tires crunching the tiny pebbles on the drive. "Okay, boys, you two go on down and play."
"But, Miss Ella," I broke in, "we want to go to church."
"Child." Miss Ella knelt down, a tear hanging off her chin and her eyes checking the back door for any sign of Rex. "Sweet boys." She took us both in her arms. "If I take you to church, that'll be the last time you ever see me."
I nodded because, even at six, I understood. Mutt stood blankly, blinking a lot, his brow wrinkled, looking at the back door through which Rex had disappeared. Mutt and I headed toward the quarry, where we knew to make ourselves invisible and stay out of Rex's way. It usually took him until after lunch to get over his hangover, or at least start working on another one, rid the house of his latest bedmate, and get on his way back to Atlanta.
"Maybe later"-Miss Ella brushed the hair out of my eyes and tried to smile-"we'll go get some ice cream."
We passed the barn, and out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Mose. Mose came around once a week to check on the horses and about every other day to check on his sister.
When Miss Ella sent Mose to college, South Alabama was a little short on black medical professionals, so he set his sights, flew through school in two and a half years, graduated, and spent two years in medical school learning to become a surgeon. Something most of his professors told him he would never be. Mose was tall, lanky, and so skinny that his belt hung on his hipbones. He had gnarled farm-boy hands, big ears, big eyes, and skin that was not white. But while his professors could control their medical school and who became what, they could not control a man named Adolf Hitler. WWII erupted, and Mose received his draft notice, checked out of school, raised his right hand, joined the army, and was promptly sent to the MASH units on th
e front lines of the European theater, where he learned to operate wearing a helmet-working two days on and four hours off. Oddly enough, while Mose was learning to doctor men, he also spent considerable time doctoring horses. In the European theater, veterinarians were in short supply; when one of the commanding officer's stable of four magnificent stallions-which he "found" in an abandoned estate in the wake of the 101st-came down with a cold or got the colic, Mose learned to doctor horses. Covered in American blood, screams, and dying confessions, Mose learned to sew, amputate, and remove shrapnel, but most important, he learned to heal. And Moses Rain was a good healer, not to mention a not-half-bad veterinarian.
After the war, Mose flew home, his chest covered with medals-including the Purple Heart. He returned to school, by that point a perfunctory obligation because he already knew how to be a doctor. With the help of the GI bill, he spent his residency at Emory in Atlanta, where his reputation preceded him and everyone called him "sir." At Emory, Moses learned to deliver babiessomething he didn't do much in Europe. He finished school, refused a half dozen offers, married a cute nurse out of Mobile named Anna, and returned home just south of Montgomery, where the two set up a family practice. When most of his colleagues were decorating their walls with diplomas, degrees, and this-or-that awards, Moses Rain hung a name tag on his door that simply read, "Mose."