I knew those people, they went to church with us. There was a basket of food on the ground that they had dropped and the mother was pressing her two children into her skirt so they couldn't see Cecilia's face, which was cut along her left temple. Her mouth was still in that same O. I lay back on the bank with her on top of me. Martha's swimsuit was half falling off of her it was so big, as if the water had made Cecilia even smaller. The man, Mr. Thompson, I can't remember now what he did for a living, he was trying to pull my arm off of her but I couldn't seem to help him. He was pushing on her chest, pushing her back into my chest, trying to work the water out of her lungs. Her hair spread out against my chest, so much longer and darker than it was when it was dry. The wife asked should she go and call for somebody but the husband said no, we should take her in ourselves.
"Come on, Son," he said. "Get up now." He helped me up and Cecilia just came with me and I knew the day was hot but I couldn't feel it anymore. I took her legs in my other arm and we walked back toward their car. The mother stayed behind. She wouldn't let the children in the car with us and they were crying. My knee was starting to swell and I was ashamed that I even knew how much it hurt.
Mr. Thompson opened the door of his car for me. "Come on," he said. He was a young man but he looked so old to me. He was sweating and his hair was slicked down against his head. "Get in the car," he said.
But I couldn't. I just stood there.
"Son," he said. "We need to get going."
"I'm soaking wet," I said. "I'll get your car all wet." It was the first thing I had said and my voice felt strange coming out of my mouth, like it had been months since I'd tried to speak.
"Don't worry about that." He helped me inside. He put us in the back, where we'd have more room. There were a couple of toys on the floor, a yellow dump truck, some other things. When I sat down Cecilia's head fell back against my shoulder and I remembered one night we were coming home from a football game and she was starting to get a cold and got so tired waiting for me to shower and change that I said I'd carry her home. When I picked her up in my arms she went to sleep right away, like a baby. I carried her home and took her in her house and her mother didn't say a word, but led me upstairs to her room. I laid Cecilia in her bed and watched her mother take off her shoes and cover her up with a blanket and we both backed out of the room together so we wouldn't wake her up.
The cut on her forehead didn't look so bad. It wasn't bleeding at all. It looked as clean as a tear made in paper. She was just so white, all her skin was cold and puckered from the water. All her skin was showing with just that bathing suit on, her legs and arms, her neck. I had never seen so much of her before, and it made me look away. I rocked her a little and said "Shhhhh," but I can't imagine why.
Mr. Thompson didn't say anything driving over, or maybe he did. He was driving fast and people were blowing their horns at us. We got to Dr. Smith's office and there was a lot of commotion once we got inside. People who'd been waiting to see the doctor were trying to take her out of my arms but I just couldn't let go of her. Mr. Thompson was crying then, I saw him.
"She drown," he said. "Son here tried to save her but she hit her head and drown the quarry."
It was the middle of the day and still so pretty outside. Even inside the light was coming in everywhere.
Then finally Dr. Smith came up to me and said, "If we're going to help her, you're going to have to let her go." And I heard help her, and my arm fell away and he took her off so fast. Martha's swimsuit going through the door. It was pink and nubby and soft and too big for Cecilia. I don't know what made her think it would fit.
They put me in, too. They wouldn't let me go home. Mr. Thompson went back to the quarry for his family. The nurse took me to a little room in the back where I took off my clothes and lay down. She said she was going to have to give me something for my knee. And then she did.
For the second time that year I was in the local papers as the victim of the worst kind of luck. Except this time I was a hero. One paper even said, "Marine Risks All in Attempt to Save Wife's Life." So many people got it wrong that I started to realize they were doing it on purpose. It sounded better to say we were just married. The people in Ashland City felt real bad for me when I got shot, but as time went on and their sons went to war and I was home in my parents' house, maybe they thought my deal wasn't so tragic after all. At least I was safe. But when Cecilia died, a wave of grief went up from every corner of the town, and the grief was as much for me as it was for her. I had loved her for as long as anyone could remember, for as long as I could remember. And when she had finally agreed to marry me everyone was happy and they said no one had ever waited for a girl the way I had and no one deserved her more. Our wedding would have been so crowded that people would have had to stand on the steps outside the church, they would have spilled out onto the street, all of them waiting to catch sight of us because they felt in some small way like they had a personal stake in the whole thing.
Folks made two casseroles, two hams, two pies, one for Cecilia's family and one for mine. They told the story to one another in our living rooms: Son had fallen asleep. His leg had been giving him a lot of pain that day and he could hardly walk. He fell asleep while Cecilia was swimming. It was such a hot day, not like May at all. Anyone crippled, anyone outside on such a day would have fallen asleep. But when she called out he woke up and ran right into the water, forgetting about the leg and the brace, forgetting that he could barely walk and couldn't swim at all he went right into the water and pulled her out but by the time he got there it was too late.
I stood in the kitchen. As much as I tried not to hear them, as softly as they spoke, I must have heard it fifty times.
When they came up onto the shore he couldn't let go of her, of her body. Yes, that's what Jim Thompson told me. He just lay there and held her and he kept saying, somebody help me, even after they were on shore and she was dead I know, it breaks my heart, too.
The weather stayed nice all week, not as hot, but warm and clear. The day that they buried her was so nice that it just made no sense at all. There were enough flowers blooming already to do the whole thing up real pretty. Those are the only two things that I remember about that day at all. The flowers were nice and the weather was nice.
People were getting used to the whole idea of funerals in 1942. My suit was hanging on the back of my closet door all the time, one memorial service or another. But that was soldiers dying, and while I don't mean to say that isn't as bad, it was something you were ready for in a way. Cecilia drowning caught everybody off guard. It just wasn't the time for that kind of loss. No one took it well, my father least of all. He couldn't get past the fact that he had sent us out there, talked us into going when clearly neither of us wanted to. He blamed himself so bitterly that I came close to telling him the truth. He wasn't the one who killed Cecilia.
Over the years I came to live with this, came to believe even that maybe there was a difference between killing someone and watching them die. But at the time it was as good as if I'd held her under the water myself, took her into the quarry and pinned her there and watched her look up at me with disbelief then fear then not at all. For days after her death I waited for the sheriff to come for me. I would hear him telling my father at the door, I would hear my father say no. When he came for me I never knew what I wanted, if it would be better to go along and have it be over or would there still be time enough for me to run out the back door and get away. Tall and lame both, I couldn't have gone too far. I didn't want to go to prison, that was the truth. Even if it meant having some peace from my own nightmares, I was too afraid.
The other thing I dreamed about was this: saving Cecilia the first time she went under. In the dream I went into the water and pulled her out, pushed the water from her chest like Mr. Thompson did, but this time her eyes flicked open and she saw me and was thankful. At that moment Cecilia would have loved me the way she had on Pearl Harbor Day, except this time she owed me her life and
so the love never changed. For a long time I believed this would have been true, and then I came to realize that, true or not, she was dead and I'd never have the chance to know for sure.
I never did tell either of these things to anyone. I just got quieter. It didn't take long for me to forget I had ever been anything but happy with Cecilia. I could see it on every tree I went by, her name carved in like a reminder of something to do. I could see it on my own shoulder, and I got to where I couldn't stand it anymore.
By the fall my knee seemed about as good as it was going to get and I told my parents I was leaving.
"Leaving for where?" my mother said.
"Doesn't matter." I couldn't bring myself to sit down at the table with them. I stood by the stove and pushed my hand through my hair over and over again. I talked to my folks so little back then that I'd already put off going for a long time because I didn't know how to tell them exactly.
"You can't just go," my mother said, sort of half smiling 'cause she was trying to keep it all from getting away from her. "We need to know where you are, how you're doing."
"I'd tell you if I knew," I said, slowly. "I just don't."
"These are hard times, Son," my mother said. "Hard times for all of us. There's been more pain for you than anyone thought possible, but it won't be different anywhere else. You're better off here, with people who love you."
My father was looking inside his cup of coffee, moving the handle back and forth as he listened. "You go if you need to go," he said. My mother looked up at him and lost the end of her smile. I looked up, too. "I want you to stay," he said. "But she's everywhere. I know that."
I felt such relief at that moment that I almost changed my mind about going. The fact that someone had seen it too, my father had seen it, gave me the closest thing to joy I'd had since her death.
If he understood, then maybe he knew this too: when she died they lost me. I would have to go away. A better man would have seen things through, stayed in town and sorted it all out. People die, terrible things happen. I know this now. You can't pick up and leave everything behind because there is too much sadness in the world and not enough places to go. But at seventeen, 1 didn't understand, and so I left.
For a long time I stayed in Tennessee, sometimes dipping down into Alabama or up into Kentucky. Once I got as far as Indiana. I can't much remember what I did where, it all pretty much runs together in my mind. Work was easy to find because I said I was a marine and had been shot. I had a limp to prove that. There was a shortage of men my age, so there was always something for me. For this same reason, women were easy to find, too. Some I stayed with for a night, others a week or two. I stayed until they wanted me to leave or, worse even, until they wanted me not to. I know I should have cared for them more than I did, but it just wasn't in me. All I wanted was to keep going. I didn't mind not having one place to live, I thought it was right. I didn't make friends or enemies either in that time. I did my jobs well, and people said so. I was good at carrying out orders.
Then one day I was hitching to Owensboro for no reason in particular and the truck I was riding in broke down near Habit. I walked into town and asked around about work and some people said if I had the stomach for it I should go down to Saint Elizabeth's. The folks in Habit didn't cotton much to Catholics back then, or to pregnant girls without husbands, though in those days they were mostly girls who got in trouble right as their fellow was going off to war and then he didn't come home.
I walked a couple of miles in the direction they pointed me and came on a neat little white house off of the road. It was smaller than I thought it would be and in good shape, which meant there wouldn't be a lot of work. I knocked on the door and a woman in her forties who was still good-looking answered.
"Evening," I said. "Is this Saint Elizabeth's?"
She laughed a little. "No, no," she said. "Over there." She pointed to a break in the woods. "In the back pasture, that way. You looking for somebody?"
"Just work."
She nodded. "I thought so. You don't look like the regular customer they get over there."
My face flushed and I turned away from her.
"You should give them a holler," she said. "They're good people. Always looking for somebody to do things."
"Much obliged," I said, and started to turn off the porch.
"You from around here?" she said.
"No, ma'am."
She looked at me hard. "I didn't think I recognized you. This is a small town. I guess I know about everybody."
"Yes, ma'am."
"We could use some new blood around here."
I nodded. "I'll be heading over there, then," I said, but when I got into her yard she called me back again. I turned around.
"What's your name?" she said.
"Son."
"Well, Son, I'm June. When you go over there, you tell them June Clatterbuck says to give you a job."
"Obliged."
"Then you come back here later and tell me how it went, you hear?"
I said I would, and I did. June Clatterbuck was the first friend I made in Habit.
I'll never forget the sight of the place, the very first time I laid eyes on it from the entrance of the drive. I forget how pretty it is. It's all just work to me now. But that night it was around six o'clock and just getting dark. The light caught in every one of the front windows and made it seem half on fire. Saint Elizabeth's was far and away the biggest place I'd ever seen in my life, and when I walked up toward it I was really hoping there'd be something for me to do so I'd have the chance to look around some in the morning. That and the fact it was getting late and I needed a place to sleep.
It was a smaller operation then, seven girls and Sister Evangeline and another Sister named Mary Joseph, who has long since passed away. Sister Evangeline was mother superior back then, but since there were just the two of them, she never brought it up to anybody.
I rang the bell, and Sister Mary Joseph answered the door. She smiled up at me. She was a real sweet woman, Sister Mary Joseph, and she said, "What can I do to help you?" That's just what she said, first thing, and that's the way she meant it, too. So I told her I was looking for work, and she said I'd have to talk to Sister Evangeline. She asked me my name and told me hers. "She's having supper now," she said. "We're all having supper. Have you eaten?" I told her I hadn't, and with that she opened the door wider and let me in. You've got to remember this was a long time ago, when folks treated each other decently without knowing them.
I followed her into the dining room where everyone was sitting together at one table. The seven girls looked down at the napkins in their laps when Sister Mary Joseph introduced me and I remember I felt so awful, like I'd caught them all half dressed or something. Back then we used to say a girl was in a family way, and the thought of that seemed so sad because here were all these girls with no families to speak of. I wanted to tell them that I should go, or at least wait in the other room until they were finished eating, but I was so embarrassed that I couldn't even speak, and when Sister Mary Joseph led me to a chair there was nothing I could do but sit in it and accept my plate.
Sister Evangeline must have been around fifty then, but she was still pretty much the same. The little tuft of hair that stuck out from the front of her wimple was brown instead of white and maybe she wasn't as heavy, but she chattered a lot and filled up people's plates with food they weren't hungry for. She tried to ask me some questions over dinner, but it was all I could do to choke out the smallest yes or no. After a while she just gave up.
"Maybe Mr. Abbott will help with the dishes tonight and give you girls a rest," she said after we had eaten our tapioca pudding.
Sister Mary Joseph gathered the girls together and led them out into the lobby. Not one of them said a word. I helped Sister Evangeline pick up the plates and took them into the kitchen. It's almost impossible for me to think about that kitchen now without Rose being in it, but this was 1944 and Rose hadn't even been born yet.
/> "You don't need to do the dishes," Sister Evangeline said once the door swung shut behind us. "I just thought it might be better for us to talk alone."
"I'd like to do them," I said. It always made me feel better, doing something to earn my keep. I turned on the hot water and stacked them in the sink.
"What kind of work are you looking for?" she asked. She was wiping down the counters but not paying a lot of attention to what she was doing and she kept missing spots.
"I'll do whatever you've got, wiring, plumbing, painting. My father's a contractor. He taught me how to do a little bit of everything."
She nodded. "That's what we need around here, a little bit of everything. I could pay you out of petty cash for a while, then write the bishop and see if there's money for bigger jobs. We've needed help around here. It's been hard getting somebody from town."
"I don't need to stay on," I said. "I'm really just passing through." I ran a couple of plates under the water and stacked them in the dish rack.
"Headed where?"
"No place special," I said, and then I was worried 'cause I didn't want to sound like a vagrant. "I like traveling, is all."
"And you don't like the war?" she said, but in a nice way.
"I got shot in the knee," I said. "I'm not much good to them anymore."
She nodded. "I see," she said. "But you didn't get shot in the war."
I never said exactly. I always liked to tell it so people would think that's what I meant without my having to lie. "No," I said. "I was shot in basic training. It was an accident."
She smiled and patted my hand. "Don't mind me," she said. "I'm just interested. You, for example. You don't seem like someone who's been to war, which is why I asked you that. That's the kind of thing that's easy to tell about a person."