Local Souls

  6

  ROPER’S BARN, NOT a barn in the sweet potato sense, started seeming a small temple-museum to whatever Doc might forge back there. We never doubted he could do something pretty doggone good. Even that miffed some on our block: it’d be hard, living within sight of a seventy-year-old model-plane-builder who suddenly constructs, say, some scale-model Cape Canaveral staging area in his own backyard. There’s something Wright Brothers cranky-crazy waiting in us all. We secretly think we’re always about to invent something wonderful.

  But Roper’s ambition was upgrading at age 70! A hormone problem? It threw into high shade even Doc’s own record-71 at golf. Even I felt bitter at times, reminding myself his real name was only Marion.

  And what about us? Jan and I would have enjoyed visiting, studying his modern floor-to-ceiling shelves. They were yet to be filled in like his inked Sunday crossword. Sure we respected a man with a plan. Isn’t it odd, though? The guy was crinkled pretty old while his slick blueprints look too new.

  We were over here perfecting our own off-duty slowness. Roper didn’t mean to call others’ bluff, of course. That would be too personal! Still, he threw into question friends’ bimonthly WWII book groups, our sciatic tennis elbows, our third or maybe fourth gin(s) and tonic(s). He’d once participated. His sudden absence seemed a diagnosis.

  Did he even know that my dulled hours—freed from insurance-office tedium—were partly spent flopped before any TV rerunning whatever nature show came next? What made this now seem lazy, almost simpleminded? Doc Roper’s bright Phase II did.

  And what, exactly, had my own Phase I been?

  CAME THE DAY we could not revive my old man, long as Roper worked on that and him. Right-off Doc turned my way, promised to turn me into a Science Fair project from his days as prodigy Marion. Roper told me in advance I might expect as many as three cardiac infarctions, three spread over what time span and when. Then he told me where I’d always find him.

  Doc explained just how we’d get around each one and, by God, we’d managed it so far. I say “we,” and I was right there, of course. For my sake, Doc swore he would subscribe to costly cardiologic journals. He’d learn the latest blood-thinning therapies and jump-start electrode apps. Then Doc did it, he kept my chest abreast of each breakthrough in turn. And I am grateful, don’t get me wrong.

  But, even man-to-man, even during my final checkup in his back-office, there was still so much two fellows this full-grown just could not say. One married father of two cannot ask someone similar, So you’re taking up your artistic future, pal? Any ideas for me left couched way-back-down-in-here?

  Thank God that, early on, he’d not suggested handing me off to young Dr. Dennis S—, a too-pretty boy some called “the new Roper.” Till his true criminal character poked out for all to see. Me, never trusted him. Too many eyelashes. “He’s no Roper,” I told one early fan. “Boy’s more a stringer.”

  Retiring, Doc had referred me to others, though. Everybody understood that three world-class cardiologists practiced an hour and a half’s drive away at Duke and UNC. Excellent technicians probably.

  But, see, I didn’t know them.

  7

  ON HIS RARE Saturdays-off, a certain tenant farmer’s kid started hitching ten miles into Falls proper. Having discovered Riverside because one axle broke, he now went back for up-close observing. Red avoided stopping downtown. They “soaked” you, any sandwich you bought. No, for him giant houses fronting river were the real show. Red jumped out of his free ride, called thanks, simply strolled the low-cost green beauty of Riverside.

  He wore what he’d worn last time: those were his clothes, shoes. And whose mansions were these? Owners of tobacco warehouses, furniture factories, banks, and boundless farmland, all living right along the water cheek by jowl, sailboat tied nodding to neighbor sailboats out back.

  One park bench rested picturesque beside the Lithium and, seeing how it overlooked a bunch of lively funny ducks, the farm boy settled. For a good while, too. Neighbors noticed. That bench had just been placed by the Garden Club because “a seating element might look well there.” It did. Red, convinced, chose to rest right here forty minutes, grinning as if about to nod or nap.

  No one from Riverside ever usually actually sat here, really. This triangular patch of green was window dressing, first turnoff onto The River Road. It meant to say, Gracious living starts here. Red Mabry, thirteen, got the signal. A black Lincoln Town Car passed, then slowed to see what jewel heist this kid, rustic as a root, might be planning. Red waved.

  Town planners had long ago chosen, not elms destined to die of a national disease, but durable beautiful maples. Their star-shaped leaves went from brilliant sour April-green to sweet coral-honey-yellow each fall. Even maples’ bark, exposed all winter, attracted. Must resemble the smoothed sweetly-terraced backs of certain imagined Episcopal ladies hereabout.

  Flanking streets, maples had managed, before World War One, to reach clear across and into one another. Now seventy feet high, they formed a continuous light-speckling tunnel.

  Lunchtime! The boy Red broke out the first of two hard-boiled eggs brought as his low-cost lunch. Why pay more downtown? He knew the names of the hens that’d laid them. In his overall’s bib, kept a little blue paper-tube of Morton’s salt. The delicate way he sprinkled it atop his half-gnawed yolk, Poppa’s pinky-up gesture, why, it would’ve put any snuff-pinching French nobleman to shame.

  And, only after wandering around unwelcomed, after getting eyed from various mullioned windows, after being spared police questioning only because he was at least technically white, my red-haired Red hitched back to the family tenant farm.

  Dairy cows stood hoofing mud, bellowing complaints. Going unmilked hurts. Evening’s warm-fisted relief was back home twenty minutes late.

  THE RIVER ROAD was Falls’ single byway always crowned with its own “The.” Smith Street was nothing but a street named Smith. But all along The River Road, owning-class folks spent weekends wandering house-to-house holding actual martini glasses. “Yoo-hoo, refills?” they called, entering without bothering to knock.

  “I seen them do that with my own eyes,” Red reported later with one head shake. “Is that friendly er what? They flat-know their favorite brand of gin is in each and ever’ mansion, sure as we got fresh eggs in ours.”

  On our farm porch, he’d again tell us how money tends to lubricate the human mind. Three or four generations into the real deep lasting cash? Why, folks have found time to play musical instruments and to really read. Hard books, too. “Seven-hundred-pagers!” They learned-up about art; they soon bought genuine oil paintings, not just for investment, no, for simple rub-up-against life-is-good beauty! Several such pictures he had glimpsed in the front hall of this one house. And you know, each had its own electric lamp built right to the frame? that important. Like some place you’d stoop and see into and then pretty much be there. You could stay safe in it several seconds.

  Yeah, Red insisted, the rich were—not so much “better” than us—nope, just “different.”

  If we were sturdy burlap, woven to stand up under barn temperatures?

  They, having only lived indoors under mansion-conditions? why, they’d been silk since 1820.

  8

  AND WHERE WAS the man best qualified to keep me moving? He must be struggling to improve his wood carving. Doc now hid himself from view. If the man still jogged, he did it late at night. Must be swimming at the club pool, forsaking his river crawl come dawn. His “studio” light burned at all hours. UPS art supplies went in but nothing actually came out. About eleven months into his hobby, our local Arts Center invited Roper to “show.”

  Doc’s being much missed, that likely inspired our will to see his woodcraft. Wasn’t it a bit too early to show? But nobody had ever accused Roper of accepting favoritism; not this man who’d convinced us each that we were all his favorite.

  Doc’s office and practice had been taken over by one thin Brahmin Indian. We’d been pict
uring a small dark man with wire specs. Gandhi, really. Roper wore an actual blazer when he and Marge brought the recent med school grad for that inaugural Sunday brunch. Doc escorted Gita around our club table-to-table. He tried and make her seem truly one of us now. She had smooth manners and the right credentials and this Masterpiece Theatre accent. She was obviously highborn, but not in Falls. Not along The River Road.

  She looked about twenty, with her giant black eyes that seemed blotters for us blondes and redheads. She wore red lipstick with one paint-chip sample of her mouth inlaid at the center of her forehead. A popular deaf old sportsman called, “Welcome aboard, young woman. You’ll be seeing lots more of me. Specially during my next colorectal, Rita.”

  “Gi-ta!” Doc laughed. —You understood she’d graduated from Atlanta’s Emory, and you knew that—next checkup—she’d be thoroughly prepped from your up-to-date manila folder that Doc never needed. But I later heard two gents say that, unlike with Roper, they couldn’t fancy discussing with Ms. Gita Patel, MD, any of their little recent erectile issues, etc. . . .

  RED GAVE HIS loved ones repeated tours of a Falls not actually his. It lay just ten miles from our farm and getting in was free . . . except for its many collection plates.

  Dad admitted to a fascinated weakness for what he called “your ‘town’ churches.” Being a contractor, he approached each sanctuary as a solemn building inspector. As the Mabrys shopped for our ideal church, bad maintenance reflected slack theology. First forays into the society of the Fallen rousted us awake many a Sabbath.

  Dad’s red Studebaker was always Turtle-Waxed just so. We drove to Falls to audition another neighborhood of Methodism. We were farmers entering a Protestant church that seemed barn-huge. Its pews were stocked with groomed “professionals” and our big shoes produced an echo all their own. We knew we’d never pass for visiting film stars. Sure, we understood that Falls’ country club wouldn’t admit us, however “country” we might look. But, not one church-usher ever body-blocked our entering even Falls’ least-smiling congregation.

  We surely appeared clean, our cheeks rosy from the best lye soap, our shoes spit-polished. And God knows my hair was combed! We ignored stares by doing ever more smiling. We three nodded a new-here pew-to-pew “Howdy.” To make up for whatever our clothes lacked, we tried singing hymns with an extra pumping rustic spirit not always understood.

  After Dad’s showing us Riverside yet again, I waited for one city limits sign past the Dairy Queen. There, parents let me loosen the noose of a black tie. Most of our way home Dad offered his review of today’s sanctuary and service. “Plaster around the heating intake duct in back was crumbling, see that? Deacons did a little touch-up painting but . . . And, not to nitpick, and I know it’s summer vacation-time. But, I’m sorry: four people is not a choir!”

  Safe again amid the quiet fields of Person County, I felt comforted. I was a Sweet Potato Mabry, native to farmland. Our ending up among the chosen frozen Fallen? I never once considered it.

  I felt quite cozy enough in our tin-roofed center-hall home. A yellow school bus stopped right by the mailbox. And my dad was admired out our way. The sight of him entering any general store (“It’s that ‘Red’ fellow, Dahlia”) brought a plump wife from the storeroom, brought the yellow hounds awake.

  Dad had assigned me, behind our house, a low-aerobic row of tomatoes to tend. I owned one mighty-envied cowboy shirt and, at my four-room school, I made real good grades and passed for “leader.” All seemed pretty-well rooted in, nestled down. Then Red rushes through our front door, yelling. He waves around some lawyers’ documents just fished from our rural box. We would get to move to Riverside. Mom and I stood holding each other. “Yes,” Red said toward our silence. Yes, Mom and I, we had to come.

  Colonel Paxton was, well, a Paxton. They’d been big noises around here since the sixteen hundreds. They’d donated the 1824 starter property for All Saints Episcopal plus several different golf and civic clubs, having plenty. See, the old colonel hailed from a Lord Proprietor’s line. That meant his family had got its tens of thousands of acres direct off the Indians by order of some faraway English king. Worldwide chess moves broke the Paxtons’ way around 1610 and pretty much ever since.

  The mansion’s den roof had caved from sheer stupid neglect. Paxton Hall’s latest aged resident had pissed off (then stiffed) many a Falls builder. He was finally forced to start phoning contractors from outlying farm communities. Dad was barely making do, constructing housing splurges by returned GIs: an added carport, many nursery extensions. Then a revered Paxton cold-called my father. Was Red too booked? Soon as Colonel started telling how to find his home, Red’s highest-pitched voice piped, “Wait one, sir. You are not 2233 on The River Road! Not that long wavy stone wall with the grass yard lately getting so full of . . . trees?”

  Dad turned up to supervise a set of botched repairs. He saw at once the roofing contractor was using poorest-grade ten-year shingles, double-charging the grizzled old man. Dad confided to the colonel he was being highway-robbed by Falls’ fancy-pants builders. Red offered to bring in his own country crew at half the price. “My guys, sir, are all born Primitive Baptists, and honest as the day is long, can’t not be.” Paxton, clueless and a hermit, had forever been an easy mark. He often gave that as his reason for nonpayment.

  The colonel listened from an upstairs balcony as Dad fired four roofers, then Paxton Hall’s most recent plumbing outfit. This struck the miser as major excitement. A certain amount of yelling happened. Paxton’s huge disintegrating place was lately visited only by restaurant deliveries, census takers, matching Mormon boys.

  Red soon returned to our field-view porch with sagas of Colonel Paxton’s bravery in the First War. Dad admitted as how, since then, the man had maybe grown a bit eccentric. True, he owed other repairmen a fortune. But the small checks he’d written Dad, they’d cleared just fine.

  Each Paxton Hall bathroom was bigger than our rental home. Each had its own huge potted palm. Each was hung with framed photos or paintings of the present heir-owner as a young soldier then an Armistice party-giver. Back then he had been as handsome as any girl can get to be beautiful. Walls around his cut black onyx tubs were paved with pictures of wild parties held here. Several such images showed the young veteran, fully bare, in all his aroused glory.

  Old Paxton had lately invited an appealing young brick-mason upstairs to see what the colonel had once looked like all over. “Now, that there’s . . . something, sir. Mighty frisky you got to have been, sir. Yeah, well, better get back to work, outside and all . . .”

  Paxton spent much time soaking in a faceted black tub, one located upstairs, one down. There he received carpenters and Chez Josephine takeout while, goatish, reading the New York papers. Each tub looked big enough to seat four. Hard to believe what poor care he’d taken of that God-given face and figure, not to mention his inn-sized house. But Dad swore that the old gentleman still had, hidden under all his gingery growling, an absolute heart of gold.

  Neighbors complained about his lawn’s weeds till those became the saplings now a tangled forest. If you didn’t know that one stone Georgian house sat jammed back in there, you assumed his yard must be the start of a state park. Dad had begun bringing his newest boss man jars of Mom’s famous pimento cheese. The old colonel felt amazed to have finally found an employee who’d return to the job-site weekends without charging overtime. (Underbilling could make you into a local whispered myth. True, both Roper and Dad did it. But, for me, poor as we started out, it’s something I have never cottoned to.)

  Paxton was glad that at least one visitor proved brave enough to risk death ascending the free-hanging spiral staircase. Creaking, it’d rocked there half-moored since Falls’ wildest party ever. Dad felt honored to be received at any home along The River Road, especially one with a name famous locally since 1610. “Red, you’re overdoing,” Mother warned as always. See, my father had taken to performing little private repairs off-book for free at Colonel P
axton’s. The blustery owner, wearing striped pajamas, would get right down on the floor beside Red, handing him the wrenches and coping saws Dad was forbidden to use.

  I visited Paxton Hall just once. Dad promised I’d enjoy the old man’s tales of killing certain Huns hand-to-hand. I was nearly eight and the old guy up past eighty. He looked me over and announced, “Lucky features, considering.” Dad laughed. “You mean he favors her? Yeah, averaged out good. The Lord was merciful in that at least. And Colonel, the boy’s smart as he is pretty, though he’ll blush, my just saying that . . . See, what’d I tell you?”

  I remember Paxton wore a long maroon bathrobe (silk, I guess) and two-toned golf shoes and that was all. His shins showed cuts and bruises I now connect with stumbling alcoholics forever at odds with the world but, first getting outdoors to that, battling their own furniture.

  He talked about certain local ladies he had experienced, naming names, imitating sounds they made during. He edited no sex-misdeed for a child’s sake and I bit my lip for shame, preventing further coloration of my whole face.

  But as the colonel sat there, his robe untied and he revealed a nasty lack of underpants. This confirmed my worst suspicions about old old families, old and increasingly careless. Given wealth enough, certain tribes, like certain people, experience wholesale second childhoods. And, with the Paxtons, thirds.

  In a year or so, Red had sold timber rights to the mansion’s front-yard, then got it tamed enough to mow. Its U-shaped drive wore new flagstones. Pop got the house looking at least half as splendid as it had during certain hunt balls of the Calvin Coolidge years. One Saturday, almost a year into their curious friendship, Red turned up uninvited, carrying a potted geranium; he’d brought some of Mother’s excellent banana pudding the colonel now swore by. Steep front doors stood open. Red soon hollered from chamber to chamber, checking bathrooms first. He found a naked Paxton floating in the upstairs tub beneath that day’s sogged New York Times. Turned out the old penny-pincher had left my father sixty-five thousand dollars and his founders’ legacy country club membership. In 1955, 65 thousand seemed to us, and others, one mighty pile of cash.