Chapter 17
At least three times a day, Becca Blair and Sarah Howell complained to one another of the tedium of their work, the fact that there was no variation in the three screws they set in, that the rifle that went by at 8:05 looked just like the rifle that went by at 4:55. But the advantageous corollary to this had always been that you had plenty of time to think. All the women on the line nodded solemnly when this point was brought up, but the fact was that there being such a great space of time to be filled with thoughts, and the noise of the factory building being of so high a volume, it was difficult to maintain concentration on almost any subject. And it was nearly impossible to think for any length of time about something that was actually pleasant.
Sarah knew this, and Becca knew it too, but the women wouldn’t admit it, even to each other, for then there would be no consolation for the monotony of their employment. But in the weeks following Dean’s return from Rucca, Sarah found herself in an even less desirable situation. She discovered that she could, with astonishing vividness, call up the scenes of her present life with Dean; tableaux that were dull, meager, and bleak. The images were like faded snapshots, carelessly taken and composed to begin with, found in an album where all the good, happy, or interesting pictures had been removed.
The picture that most frequently came to Sarah’s mind was her coming to Dean in the hospital for the first time, the very night of the accident. He was motionless, seemingly without sense or intelligence or will, wrapped in the bandages that would obliterate his personality for her. At that time, she knew it was possible he would die, and that gave a real substance to her grief, but now when she thought of the body in that ancient army hospital bed, with the rusted iron headboard pushed against a dull green wall, she knew what she hadn’t known then—that she would be put through what was perhaps worse than Dean’s death: a permanent widowhood in which she must always bear her husband’s corpse at her side.
A second picture was Dean’s being brought from Rucca to Pine Cone in a military ambulance. It wasn’t that he had needed the attention or special care, for Sarah had been told that he could have got along just as well stretched across the back seat of Becca’s Pontiac, but until he was installed at home in Pine Cone, and Sarah had signed certain documents, he was still the direct responsibility of the United States Army, and they could not afford to take chances. Dean was carried into the house on a stretcher—Sarah had seen a corpse dragged out of a burning car with a lot more life in it—and deposited on the bed. Sarah stood back, leaning against the window, saying nothing, while Jo, sitting in the plush chair at the foot of the bed, berated the two army medical interns for their clumsiness, which was apparent only to her. Sarah saw the two men to the door, apologized for her mother-in-law, thanked them, and waved sadly as they drove off. She returned slowly to the bedroom, and as soon as she was within the door, Jo was commanding her to do this and do that for Dean’s comfort: to loosen the string round his pajamas, to turn his hands so that they rested palm side up, to lower the shades in the room. It was the first time that Jo had seen Dean, and Sarah was very much surprised that she seemed not in the least dismayed by his appearance. For that moment Sarah ignored Jo, and stared at the figure on the bed; it occurred to her forcibly that Dean was now her total responsibility forever and forever. She was a mule, and Dean would be a heavy rider who would never come down from her back—and Jo was a fat, loathsome mongrel, yapping, and biting at her legs, and making her slow, aimless, unceasing progress a torture.
There were other photographs in the mental album: of herself with trays of food, endlessly feeding Dean with a tarnished spoon that sometimes broke off in his mouth; of Jo, in the plush chair, hemming her enormous dresses and talking to her son, of God-knew-what-terrible-things, and leaving off abruptly whenever Sarah came near and tried to hear what she said; of Dean, lying on the bed, lying on the sofa, propped up on pillows, sunk into the back of a chair: silent and unmoving.
The pictures came without her willing them, and stayed though she wished them away. She tried to concentrate on the three screws, but they wavered, and disappeared, and the hateful album fell open before her. Sarah felt that she was as much debilitated by the imaginary photographs as by the actual trouble of maintaining her husband. Becca Blair watched her friend closely through these days and for her sake repeated a little prayer every hour on the hour, and even said two of them, to make up, if she missed her time by so much as a minute.
The afternoon after the Coppage fire, as they were driving home, Becca said without preamble, “What you gone do, hon? What you gone do?”
Sarah knew what Becca was talking about. “I don’t know, Becca. Just get used to it, I guess.”
“Ohhh!” repeated Becca, with a sigh, “What you gone do?”
In all of this, there was but one thing for which Sarah Howell felt that she could be truly thankful—and that was that she was never there when the doctor changed the bandages around her husband’s neck and head.
Chapter 18
The sun was still shining brightly when Sarah returned from work that afternoon. The air was hot, even this late in the day. She found her husband and her mother-in-law in the backyard.
Dean wore white cotton socks, khaki pants, and a Hawaiian shirt over his bandages. The effect was ludicrous, but horribly so, because his neck and head were completely covered with the tape. He lay in the hammock like a desecrated mummy.
The motionless body of her husband made Sarah uneasy. She had slept on the couch in the living room ever since his return, and she had never gotten over the feeling that she was sharing the house with a corpse, that Dean was somewhere else, still at Fort Rucca perhaps, or already in Vietnam, and that the body of bandages in her bedroom—and here in the hammock—was a practical joke played on her by someone unknown and malevolent.
Jo Howell was spread across the tiny straight-backed chair in a way that only emphasized her obesity. She shooed the flies off her son with a paper fan, and kept the hammock in gentle motion.
“What’d you hear?” said Jo, as soon as Sarah approached.
“About what?” said Sarah.
“About the fire,” replied Jo. “Dean wants to hear everything,” said his mother, with quiet maliciousness, “Larry Coppage was his good friend for just years on years, and now Larry’s done gone and burned up like quail in a brushfire, and Dean wants to hear everything.”
Sarah nodded, inwardly wondering how it was possible for Jo to tell whether Dean were listening, or even that he could hear anything at all that they said. She dropped cross-legged onto the grass, and then in a very quiet voice, Sarah told her mother-in-law all that she had heard that day at the plant. She related the gossip, old and new, dredged up from the past, or newly created for the occasion, about Larry Coppage, his wife, and the five children, who had perished the night before in the burning house.
Of course there had been major consternation at the factory over the unfortunate destruction of the Coppage family. Larry was high up in the administration, was kin to the people who owned and controlled the place, and was liked by virtually everyone. Very few who came to the plant on Thursday morning had not already heard about the fire and its melancholy consequences. People felt bad because of it. They pitied the poor family, and were disturbed that not a single member was left on whom they could heap condolences and platters of food. Larry, so far as the administration was concerned, was the only member of the Coppage family that was easy to get along with, and they had depended on him—beyond his capacity in the personnel department—to be an occasional middleman between them and the principal stockholders. He was a severed link now.
Many women on the line knew Rachel through the church or the PTA, and though she was a woman who kept pretty much to herself, she was disliked in no quarter of the town. And if Rachel’s children had been rowdy at times, they were indisputably good-natured, and it was a terrible thing that all five had been taken at once. Old Man Coppa
ge, Larry’s father, was deprived at one blow of his only son and all his grandchildren. (His only daughter lived alone in New York City, and had declared her intention of never marrying.) Some said he had gone to his bed when he heard the news, and others said he would never leave it again. The Alabama congressional representative had sent a telegram to the Pine Cone Munitions Factory, which was mimeographed and distributed to all the employees.
And all the talk on the morning and afternoon coffee breaks, and across the whole of the lunch hour had been the deaths of the Coppages.
“What they can’t figure out though,” said Sarah, “is how the thing started. Everything’s gone now, so there’s no way of finding out. Must have just been something wrong with the wiring.”
Jo nodded with a small smile, and then punched her son affectionately with her fist. “You hear that, Dean?” she cackled. “Wiring!” Jo turned back to Sarah. “Wiring’s real bad in some houses. Don’t know what it’ll do sometimes, don’t know what!” She laughed again, and Sarah was at a loss to understand Jo’s glee over the deaths of the seven Coppages. Jo shrugged contemptuously, and would not explain herself.
“But even supposing it was the wiring, which it must have been,” Sarah continued doubtfully, “what they really don’t know is why none of them got out. All the children, except the baby, knew how to walk; there wasn’t nothing wrong with Rachel or Larry. And the fire wasn’t all that quick. So why didn’t none of them get out of there?”
“Can’t say,” said Jo, smiling despite herself, a leering smile that made Sarah uneasy. “Won’t never know, will we?” She fairly screamed then at the hammock. “Won’t never know, will we, Dean!”
There was no response.
“Now I didn’t say nothing at all to anybody,” said Sarah, nervously, for she didn’t like the way that her mother-in-law was acting, “about your giving that thing to Larry Coppage yesterday when he was over here at the house. And I’m still wondering why you did it. It’s gone now, of course, and if you hadn’t given it away, we’d still have it. It didn’t make a bit of sense for you to give it to him for Rachel, because you couldn’t stand Rachel, even when she was alive, which was just yesterday, and Dean couldn’t either. And I still want to know what you were thinking of . . .”
Jo had quieted herself a little. Her eyes cast about the yard, avoiding Sarah’s glance. In a much more even voice, she said, “I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t know why I gave it to them.”
“You mean,” said Sarah, “it was a story when you said Dean wanted you to do it.”
“No, no,” said Jo, her hands twisting in her lap, “it wasn’t a story . . .”
Sarah realized that she could have continued to question Jo, but the entire subject was distasteful, and even if she could make the woman admit that she had lied, she would have accomplished nothing. It was strange, all of what had happened, and Sarah could not see her way through it. There was one crazy thing, the gift of the amulet; and there was another crazy thing, the deaths of all the Coppages. And because the two events occurred so close upon one another, it looked as if they were related. But that wasn’t possible, was it? What could be the connection between that piece of jewelry, and the fire a couple of hours later? Jo could have given them a cake or something and Sarah wouldn’t have thought anything about it, except maybe to wonder if they had had it for dessert before they were burned up. It was that piece of jewelry—that she had never seen before, that looked so strange. It was that necklace, and the disc hanging on it, that troubled her, she realized at last; and she knew enough about Jo to be sure that no amount of questioning would get out of her the reason she had given it to Larry. Not yet, at any rate.
Sarah had lied to Jo when she told her that no one else knew about the gift of the amulet; Sarah had not forgotten that she had spoken to Becca of it. But Jo was obviously hiding something, and Sarah thought it best that she hold back a little something herself.
This would bear a little more talking-out with Becca; Sarah wished desperately that her friend had been there when Jo gave the thing to Larry Coppage. Because Sarah had only seen it once, because she had only glimpsed it and not examined it carefully, because it had been destroyed so quickly afterwards, Sarah almost had the feeling that she had perhaps imagined the whole thing. It was almost easier to do that, than to try to find reasons for things happening the way that they did.
Chapter 19
Becca knew that on this Thursday, her friend Sarah was feeling even lower than usual. Dean was constantly preying on her mind, and now there were the Coppages. Sarah would probably have taken that pretty hard anyway, but there was the complication that she had been one of the last people—if not the very last—to see the man alive. After their supper that night then, Becca Blair sent her daughter Margaret over to their neighbors’ house. “Margaret, you go beat on the door, and ask Sarah if she don’t want to come over and play a little Monopoly or Clue or something.”
Margaret did just that, and she returned three minutes later with Sarah.
“You came quick,” Becca commented.
“I just that minute finished with the dishes . . .”
“You didn’t mind leaving Dean?” said Becca.
“Nooo,” replied Sarah cautiously, and glanced at Margaret. “It don’t seem to matter much if I’m there or if I’m not. It’s just about the same. And anyway, Jo is there to keep him company. I think she started to talk to him the minute I left the room. I’m glad she can do it,” said Sarah, and shook her head solemnly, “ ’cause I sure cain’t.”
Then she looked up and smiled broadly at Becca and Margaret. “I’m so glad that you asked me to come over though, ’cause there’s sometimes that I think I just need to get out of that house. There are some times it seems close and confining to me . . .”
Becca took this as a signal that they were to say no more just then about Sarah’s problems; the poor woman spent enough time worrying about them as it was.
“Sarah!” cried Becca suddenly, “it’s already past eight o’clock, and if we don’t get the board down this very minute, we are gone be here till the world goes black on doomsday!”
Margaret ran out of the kitchen to fetch the Monopoly set, and in the short space she was absent, Sarah reached across the little yellow kitchen table and clasped Becca’s hand beneath hers. “I sure do ’preciate it . . .” she said.
Becca blushed, and said with some confusion, “ ’preciate what, hon?”
“Ever’thing. Ever’thing you’re doing for me . . .”
“I’m not doing nothing,” said Becca, with her eyes downcast, and only looked up again when Margaret had come back.
“Ohhhh! Mama,” cried Margaret. “Can I be the red piece? The one that looks like the fire hydrant? That’s my lucky piece, ’cause I played with the red piece last time I was over at Mary-Louise’s, and I won. I beat ’em all! I even beat her daddy, and he’s a mean man, and tries to cheat! Isn’t that terrible! I mean, him just sitting there at the table trying to cheat, and embarrassing Mary-Louise and me to death, and everybody knows he’s doing it . . .”
And so the game began and continued for the next couple of hours. Margaret did most of the talking, telling her mother and Sarah all the gossip from the school, relating stories about her classes and her teachers. Becca thought that this was the best way to keep Sarah’s mind off the topics that distressed her.
But it proved impossible to avoid mention of the Coppages’ deaths. Margaret recounted all the theories and stories that had circulated that day at the high school in Elba, among the students who were from Pine Cone; but most everybody had seemed to agree that it must have been the wiring, or oily rags in a closet or a can of spray paint that got overheated and exploded or a burner on the stove that Rachel had forgotten to turn off after supper, or any one of the other things that are well known to be home safety hazards. However, no one had any idea why none of the seven members of the family had escaped.
Sara
h listened very attentively to all that Margaret had to say on the subject. And, at the end of it, when she and Margaret were playing out the last moves of the game—Becca having been eliminated about ten minutes before—Sarah said, “Becca, you still got that wee-gee board I gave you for Christmas?”
Becca nodded hesitantly.
The first Christmas after they had become good friends, Sarah gave Becca a Ouija board. Sarah had been greatly disappointed with Becca’s reaction to the present. She had looked both shocked and displeased when she opened the carefully wrapped package.
“You don’t like it?” Sarah said to her friend. “Or you’ve already got one?”
“No,” said Becca. “I don’t have one . . .” She spoke this very reluctantly.
Sarah was puzzled. “I knew you were interested in that kind of thing: ghosts and spirits, and talking to the dead, and all that.”
“Well,” said Becca, “I am. I believe in it. But I like to read about it. And that’s all. But a wee-gee board is bad luck, it’s real bad luck. It’s only the bad spirits that answer the wee-gee board . . .”
“But you think it works?” said Sarah.
“Oh,” said Becca. “I know the thing works. I’ve seen it work a hundred times. But it calls down the bad spirits. They answer your question—perfectly innocent—like who you’re going to be dating next year, and then they stay and they kill your dog. Or something worse.”
“I’m sorry that I gave it to you then,” said Sarah quietly.
“Oh, hon!” cried Becca, “you didn’t know. You didn’t know about the bad spirits, and I’m real thankful for it. I’m glad to have it, you know, in case of emergency, but I think I’m just gone keep it in the top of the closet, where it won’t be no harm to anybody . . .”