I looked to Wattie. “In her bedside drawer.”
I opened it and found fleecy socks in a multitude of cheerful colors. None of them had airplanes on them, and Birchie called flying “so much nonsense.” Neither she nor Wattie had ever once gotten on a plane, not in their whole, long lives.
“You brought her a pair like this from the airport once,” Wattie said. I vaguely remembered that. “She loved them. Frank helped us order more off of the Internet.”
I knelt and put the socks on, and then it was time to tuck her between her cool, clean, lemon-colored sheets. I didn’t, though. I stayed kneeling, looking up at her.
Frank had told me not to ask. Maybe it was better not to know, but I was going to know soon anyway. Science was going to tell me. I’d rather hear it from this mouth I loved. Whatever truth she told me would change nothing.
“Birchie,” I said. “Birchie, is it Ellis? Is it your father in that trunk?”
She looked at me, her eyes bird bright and so, so blue. One soft hand came out to pat my cheek. “Yes, honey,” she said, almost like she was sorry for me.
“Leia,” Wattie said, a warning bell that I ignored.
“Did you put him in there, Birchie?” I asked her.
“I surely did.”
From this angle she looked like an apple-head doll, her lips sinking into her face because her bridges were out. Then she smiled at me, and it was a baby’s smile, gummy and wide, sprinkled with teeth.
“Did you . . . ?” This I could not ask, but she answered anyway.
She raised her hand, her arm bent at the elbow. Her hand fisted around an imaginary handle. She brought her hand down, once, in a definitive swing.
“Lord, Lord,” she said. “I’ll never forget that sound. That bone noise. It was like stepping on ground seashells.”
That jabbed the breath right out of me. It was so specific. It sounded true.
“But it had to be self-defense,” I said with surety. In Birchville her father’s name was linked to words like “hard” and “proud.” He knew his worth, and he made sure everybody else knew it, too, Myra Rhodes would chime in when Ellis Birch was mentioned in her presence. He’d been “Mr. Birch” to every human in the town, except his daughter. To her he’d been “Daddy.” Even so, he must have caused her to do it. But when I tried to say it, it came out like a question. “You didn’t have a choice?”
Birchie’s gaze on me didn’t waver. “I had a choice. I made it,” she said, but that could mean anything. That could mean she’d had a choice to live or die, or a choice to save someone in danger. I wanted it to be a choice that put her squarely in the right, but she kept on talking. “He was sitting in his chair, reading the paper. I came up behind him.”
She made that gesture again, and in an awful way it reminded me of Rachel. Virginia didn’t have a baseball team, so Rachel was a Braves fan. The Tomahawk Chop, she and Jake called it, when they put on their red shirts and had their sportsball friends come over.
“That’s Lewy bodies talking. That’s not true,” I told Birchie, but I did not believe me.
Her nostrils flared, and I saw a sharpness come into her eyes. I was irritating Birchie, the real Birchie, the one who was alive in morning hours and afternoon moments and nighttime sparks like this one.
“Enough. It’s too late to get all riled now,” Wattie said. She held up Birchie’s most recent copy of Persuasion, read almost to pieces. “Out you go. Let me tuck her in and do our reading.”
I stood in the hall for I don’t know how long, crying into my hands and listening through the door to electric crickets and the deep, sweet voice of Wattie reading aloud. I wept because my great-grandfather’s bones had been upstairs in a trunk for my whole life, and because my Birchie had put them there. Now she was so frail and folded, brain-sick and as innocent as a baby. I pictured her small hand with its short, coral-colored nails and pale blue veins. I could not imagine those lined, powder-dry fingers wrapped around a hammer.
She didn’t even own a hammer. But that chopping motion had been so definitive. She had once swung a hammer at a person. At her own father, and when I’d told Lavender that we Birches had bad luck with fathers, oh, what an understatement that had been.
Ellis Birch had been proud, but also the town’s benefactor. Had he secretly been awful? Even if he had, I knew a lot of awful people. If being awful were reason enough, there would be ball-peen hammers sticking out of the brainpan of every other person walking. The way I’d felt about Cody Mack today, I might have put his in myself. It was one thing to let Violence eat up paper people, but in real life? Dear old ladies didn’t kill their daddies and tuck the bodies away up in their attics.
Except my dear old lady had.
I stood hitching and snotting into my scarf until I was flat wept out. Then I stood waiting, hollow and dry inside, because all the truth and all the weeping in the world would not change my decision. That roaring wash of love I’d felt, standing in the balcony at church, it was still in me. It was more powerful than truth or tears.
I’d always thought of myself as lawful good, but I wasn’t going to do the right thing here. I wasn’t even certain what the right thing was, but I wasn’t going to do it. Instead I would use every weapon in my arsenal to protect my Birchie. Pity, public opinion, her standing in the town, her money. I would use it all.
If Birchie had been younger, and wholly in her right mind, it might have been a harder decision. But this thing she’d done, years and years ago, it was too late to ask her to pay for it now. The law might not set a statute of limitations on murder, but Justice had missed its window. I set my white hat on a high hall shelf, trading it for a gray one and a long dark cloak. This time Justice had to eat the bill.
Damp-faced but decided, I waited for Wattie, listening through the door as she read about Anne Elliot, with her lost Captain Wentworth and her lost bloom.
Wattie came out at last. She was half asleep on her feet, but she took one look at me and said, “Come on, Sorrow. You need hot tea.”
I should have let her go to bed, but I couldn’t.
“We both could use hot tea, I think,” I said, following her toward the kitchen.
She snorted. “Forget that, honey. After today? I need bourbon.”
That surprised me. Birchie was a Baptist, but she was a rich, white Baptist, which meant she drank sherry at will and champagne at Christmas and kept a bottle of Blanton’s as medicine for shock and head colds. Wattie, a minister’s wife, rarely touched the stuff.
The downstairs was deserted. Rachel and Lavender must already have gone up to their rooms. I got out mugs and honey and the box of Sleepytime tea bags, and Wattie put the kettle on. We didn’t talk again until we were settled side by side in the kitchen nook, holding our steaming cups. Wattie had put a generous slug of the Blanton’s into hers. We both took a sip, and she winced at the taste, reaching for the honey bear. She didn’t seem inclined to speak even then.
I said, “I want to know why.”
She looked surprised. “I can’t tell you that.”
“Can’t or won’t?” I asked.
She shrugged, stirring honey into her toddy, and then she set her spoon down and spread her hands, showing me her pale, creased palms, as if to prove that they were empty of answers.
“You have to have an idea. A guess. Something.”
“I could make a thousand guesses, but only Birchie and Jesus know for sure and certain what was in her head, what was in her heart, when she went creeping up on her daddy with that hammer.”
I shuddered at the image, but I soldiered on. “Did Floyd know why, do you think?”
Wattie turned her lips down. “Lord no. That sweet man! He never even knew that chest was in the attic. Not any more than you did.”
“How can you be sure?” I asked.
Wattie looked at me over the rim of her mug like she was sizing me up. She took another slug of doctored tea and answered.
“That first summer they were married? Ther
e was a smell in the house. Very faint, you understand, because we had packed that trunk real nice. Lined it with plastic, put in lime. But still, sometimes, through the vents, a little smell would come. That July, Floyd went under the house four times, trying to find whatever possum or skunk had died down there,” Wattie said. She took a large, solemn swallow of her tea. “He didn’t know.”
My brain had caught on one word: “we.”
I asked, “So were you there when she . . . when it happened? Did you see?”
That was not the real question. I was asking how many little old ladies in this house had committed premeditated murder, and she knew it.
“No, baby. It was done when I got here. A bit of time had passed, too. He was cool as icebox pie. I’ll never forget the feel of his skin when we went to shift him. Like waxed leather. He was on the rug on top of his crumpled newspaper. His port glass was on the side table, so it had happened after dinner. She only called me because she couldn’t shift him on her own, and he was starting to stiffen up.”
Wattie sounded so matter-of-fact, so calm and regular, but my eyes felt dry from not blinking. My mouth was dry as well, but I didn’t drink my tea. My throat felt like it had forgotten how to swallow. I had to tell my lungs to breathe, because they had forgotten, too, all my body’s regular business pausing in the wake of these flat words.
They were new for me, but Wattie’d had them in her for sixty years. Maybe she’d long ago come to terms with her part in it. But maybe not, because she picked up her mug and gulped it all down. From the heat of my own mug, I knew that it was still scalding hot. She powered through, even as a fine mist of sweat broke out on her forehead. She set the empty mug aside.
“Drink yours, too. You need the sugar. You’re white as a haint.”
“You happened to come over?” I asked, and then sipped obediently.
She shook her head. “No, no. She called me on the telephone. It was past ten, which was late to be using a party line. That time of night, a phone call meant someone was dead or something was on fire, so she knew I wouldn’t be the only one to pick up on my ring. Her voice was strained, and she said something like, ‘Wattie, can you come over? I need you to help me get Daddy packed.’”
I was so punchy that I snorted and choked a little on my tea.
Wattie didn’t seem to get her own gruesome pun. She patted my back until I stopped coughing, and then she kept right on talking.
“She told me her daddy had some bad business troubles. Ruinous, she said. As soon as his trunk was packed, he was heading for Charleston. It was smart, you know, because it gave the town something to be talking about. The Birch fortune in jeopardy. It made sense that the next few days Birchie would be so pale and jumpy. ‘Already an old maid,’ people said. ‘What’s she going to do now, if her daddy really has lost it all?’ Birch money kept this town alive in a lot of ways. And yet people can’t help but ugly-like a riches-to-rags story, seems to me.”
She poured another slug of bourbon directly into the dregs in the mug. Added honey. Stirred.
“When she said he had died of a heart attack in Charleston, people believed her. She was Emily Birch. Of course they believed her. It helped that he had always been a portly, red-faced fellow. Big-bellied, you know? And so proud! Kept everything bottled. Dropping dead of a heart attack sounded like exactly what he’d do. It helped that the man didn’t have a single close friend in this whole world. He kept himself and Birchie separate, lording like King Poop up on his high, brown mountain.” That surprised me. I’d heard Ellis Birch described as a proud man, but usually in reverent terms and tones. Wattie paused long enough to drink the thick, sweet liquid, making a face in spite of all the honey. “Off Birchie went to Charleston. Everyone thought, you know, that she would bring her daddy back, put him in the Birch family crypt, right across the street. But she didn’t return. Not for weeks. She sent word that his business problems were keeping her in the city and that she’d buried him there. It didn’t make perfect sense, but it made enough. There’s plenty of Birches buried in Charleston.
“When she did finally come home, no one knew if she was rich or poor. It was exciting for them, like watching a moving picture. My mother went to collect her at the train station, and I went, too. Birchie had us take her right to Floyd Briggs’s store. He was in there, behind his counter. Lots of people were there. More people were there that day than would fit in that store, if you listened to the stories folks told after.
“Birchie—she was still called Miss Emily then—she walked right up to Floyd, and between us, he wasn’t all that much to look at. You’ve seen his portrait. Gingery fellow, pale as the moon. But he had some chin, you know. Some gumption. He’d been the hardest of her suitors to run off. He had a way with words, and he used to slip her poetry in church, until her daddy caught wind and nipped it. He had a sweet, kind heart.
“She walked right in and she said, ‘You wanted to marry me once.’ And he said, ‘I remember.’ And she said, ‘Daddy said you were only after our money. Was that true?’ Nobody in that store was breathing. Truth be told, there were only six or seven folks, but I was one of them, so I know, and I tell you—no one breathed. He said, ‘No, ma’am. That was not true.’
“Now, I knew that the Birch fortune was fine. Never had been in any danger. But Floyd surely didn’t know, no more than anybody else in Birchville.
“He was a moonfaced greengrocer, and she was already stout, an old maid with lines around her eyes. But when he dropped to one knee and took her hand, right there, and he asked her in front of God and everybody? Well. They were Bogey and Bacall.
“That was all anybody talked about. It made her daddy’s death second-page news. Then the town come to find out she had saved the family fortune after all. Some folks said her daddy had actually done something that saved it, right before he passed. You know, back then fellows didn’t like to think about a lady doing money things. Well! That took up two Sundays’ worth of jawing. Then someone had a baby, and someone’s wife ran off with a vacuum salesman, and the United States put a satellite up right into space. Elvis joined the army. There were always new things to talk about. So that was that.”
I tried to imagine what it must have felt like, knowing. Watching nothing happen. Birchie marrying immediately, not willing to waste a day, because any day could be the day that she was caught. But instead time passed and the hot summer did its work. There was the faint smell of a possum dead under the house, and then the smell of fall leaves, and then nothing.
Years rolled by. She’d had a baby. Buried her husband and then her son. Let decades’ worth of furniture and books and boxes do the work of burying her father. By the time I was a little girl, neither of them so much as flinched when I asked if I could go and play with all the old things stuffed up in the attic.
I said, “You never asked her why?”
“I helped her when she asked me, baby, and that was all. I loved her. I still love her,” Wattie said. Her full mouth twisted down in a way that telegraphed an understatement. “I never did care for him much.”
Something like a laugh got out of me. A disbelieving and exhausted noise. If it hadn’t been for Digby, I’d have poured the rest of the Blanton’s into my mug. Maybe directly into my mouth. As it was, I sat clutching my cooling tea like it was a lifeline.
She pushed her own sticky mug away, like she was finished. Finished drinking, finished talking. She put her hands on the table, preparing to push back and go to bed. I grabbed her arm, pausing her.
“Why would you help her hide a body and not even ask why? Why would you?” In the bedroom she had told me that if their roles were reversed, if Wattie had Lewy bodies and Birchie were still hale, Birchie would care for her just the same. How did she know? What kind of love was this, a love that didn’t sell itself out, no matter what? “What did she do for you?”
Wattie patted my hand, but then she stood up anyway. When I did not let go, she put her own hand on my head.
“Sweet girl.
I’ve flat adored you since you were nothin’ but a bump inside your mother, but that is not any of your business. Your grandmother and I? We have been on this earth a long, long while. We came up in a different time than you. Some nights these southern trees around here bore some strange fruit. You understand me? Now, I don’t talk about that mess. Not with pretty little white girls whose foot never touched the earth until years after Dr. King got buried in it. I will only say this: Every minute of my life, your grandmother has been my good and loyal friend.”
Her hand stayed on my head, like she was blessing me, and her large brown eyes were solemn and serious. I wanted to ask her a thousand questions, but she’d made it plain that I was not allowed. It was like I heard the echo of a distant door closing, so far away that the sound had had to travel years and years to come to me.
She was right. I would never know what her life had been like eighty years ago, or seventy, or fifty. Or even now. My arms went around myself involuntarily, holding a brown boy I flat adored, though he was only a bump inside me.
“Get some sleep, Wattie. You’re exhausted,” I said.
She chuckled. “Baby, I’m more than that. I’m nigh on drunk. For the third time in almost ninety years, Jesus forgive me. You go to bed, too, and don’t fret, hear me? Things feel hard now, but it will pass. Everything passes, and something new comes along to fill the space.” As she spoke, her tone shifted. She wasn’t talking about me anymore. “You can’t go around holding the worst thing you ever did in your hand, staring at it. You gotta cook supper, put gas in the car. You gotta plant more zinnias.”
She turned away and went on up to bed.
I sat in a slump at the table for a moment. It felt like 3:00 a.m., but my watch said it wasn’t even time yet for the nightly news. The whole house was quiet and still. We had all shifted to little-old-lady hours. Early supper, early bed, up with the sunrise to spend time with Birchie at her best. She needed the house quiet after eight.
I got up and went back to my sofa in the sewing room, feeling shipwrecked as I changed into my pajamas and brushed my teeth. I lay down, but I couldn’t sleep. I don’t know how long I lay there before the chime of a text landing in my phone roused me.