“Well, yeah,” Father said, like it was perfectly reasonable that she would love a dead man’s coat more than the person she was supposed to marry. “It’s Vause.”
“And it’s Jottie, too,” I started to say, when suddenly he sat up straight, looking down Academy Street.
There she was. She was walking, alone, past the Caseys’ house. I could see her perfectly, her locket shining against the front of her dress, her tan hat on her dark hair, her worn purse hooked over her wrist. Plenty of people would have thought she looked just like anybody, but she wasn’t, and all the ones who say that’s the truth about most people don’t understand what she was.
Father smiled, watching her.
She passed the Lloyds’ house. “Stand up,” I said. “She’ll see us then.”
“Nah,” he said, his eyes following her. “I’d better go.”
“No!” I cried, but he rose, moving quickly toward the window. Leaving. “No!” I didn’t even think about falling off. I stood up, grabbed his hand, and pulled him around, and for the first time in my life, I was faster than he was. “Jottie!” I called.
She looked from side to side before she looked up. “Willa! What in God’s name do you think—” She stopped. She didn’t say anything, just looked and breathed in and out.
Father didn’t say anything, either.
“Come on up,” I said finally.
“Hey, Jottie,” Father croaked. He cleared his throat. “Hey.”
She frowned. “I told you not to come here, Felix.”
“Oh, Jottie, please,” I begged. “Please come up. For just a minute.”
She didn’t say anything. After a moment, she went inside.
—
Father sat down—dropped, practically—and we waited. For a while I was worried that she wasn’t going to come. But then we heard her at the window. I turned around to watch. Jottie could walk the roof just like Father could—you’d think she did it every day of her life, that’s how graceful and calm she was. I made room for her on my bedspread and she sat beside me. She and Father didn’t talk and they didn’t look at each other, either. They just sat in silence for ages.
“How was the sesquicentennial?” I inquired politely.
“Boring,” said Jottie. “You’re talking, I notice.”
I made a face at her and tried another subject. “Did you have some ice cream?”
“No.”
This from Jottie, who was always telling us that polite conversation was the ball bearing of civilization. I began to get scared. What if they didn’t speak at all? Father would leave, and she’d never let him come back. Anxiously, I peered out into the leafy emptiness for a topic.
Finally Jottie said, “Hank’s got a warrant out on you.”
Father looked at her quickly and nodded, but he didn’t speak.
All of a sudden, she shuddered all over, the way a horse does when it’s got something on it. “No,” she said, and got to her feet. “I’m sorry, Willa. No. It’s too late.” Father turned his head away.
She made to go, but I quick grabbed her skirt in my hand. She’d rip it if she kept walking. “Jottie. Stop. I can explain.” I couldn’t wait for them.
She stopped. “You can explain what?”
“What happened.” I closed my eyes so I could tell her how I saw it in my head. “He didn’t expect it,” I began. “He didn’t think it would happen the way it did, with the flames burning up the walls so quick.” I looked at Father. He was still facing away, but he was listening. “He never thought that they’d get hurt or that one of them might die. He’d never thought that could happen, but then, all of a sudden, it was happening, and he didn’t know what to do.” Jottie lowered herself down, listening. “And later, when he found out Vause was dead, he felt so sick he thought he might die himself, because in just that one little minute, he’d lost everything.” I was still holding her skirt, and I yanked on it. “Everything. And he’d done it to himself. It was all his own fault. Just like me. I ruined everything. I wrecked Father’s life and my own, too, and, Jottie”—I had her now; she was watching me—“if I could have thought of it quick enough, I would have lied, too. I would have said anything to keep you from sending Father away.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” she said, squeezing my hand. “It’s not the same. Not at all—”
“I feel like it is,” I said. “I feel sick every time I think of it. I feel so sick I wish I could disappear.”
“Me too.” Father turned to look at me. “How’d you figure all that out?”
“I thought about it until I could picture it.”
“Yeah, well, you got it right.” He shook his head, so tiredly I could hardly bear it. “And like you said, when I think of it now, I wish I could disappear. Or maybe smash my head in so I don’t have to remember it anymore.” He swung around to look at Jottie, with his red eyes, but she ducked away so she wouldn’t have to look back. He pulled in a breath. “The last time I saw him alive, the last minute, was when we came through Parnell’s door and saw the whole corridor was on fire. I couldn’t believe how big it had gotten.” He ran his hand over his face. “It had been almost nothing before. Just a half hour before, it had been nothing. I yelled that we should go through Arlie’s office; it was burning, but we could still get out if we ran fast. Vause didn’t answer; he was turning around and around, trying to find a way out, but he looked over, and I could see what he was thinking. He was thinking, I’ve wasted my life on you, Felix. It was right there on his face, like he’d finally figured it out, like I’d been playing him for a sucker his whole life.” Father stopped for a second, remembering. “He looked at me like I was something he wouldn’t touch. I tried to pull him, come on, come on, let’s go this way, but, you know, he was stronger than me—he hit my hand away and ran, back toward the stairs, because he didn’t believe me anymore. He didn’t believe I would have done anything to get him out.” He hunched his shoulders. “I would have done anything, Jottie.”
She didn’t lift her head.
“There was so much smoke,” he went on, “I couldn’t see, and it was so loud I couldn’t hear. I was shouting and I couldn’t hear it. I ran back the way he’d gone, but I couldn’t see him—I couldn’t see anything. Then I thought maybe he’d made it down the stairs, so I ran down; they were just about to collapse, and I crashed into the door. That’s how I found it. Okay, I thought, he’s outside, he’s safe, so I went outside and then”—he gave a little groan—“there were people everywhere. I ran, I looked for Vause, all up and down the streets. We hadn’t made a plan to meet up, because I thought we’d be together, so I just ran up and down and up and down, looking for him, until I had to hide, you know, at Tare’s.” Father rubbed his hands against his knees, back and forth. “I had a few hours where I still thought he’d gotten out, for sure he’d gotten out, and maybe the pair of you were leaving town without me. That’s what I hoped for, I swear I did.” He looked up, wanting to see if she believed him.
Jottie still wouldn’t look at him. She shook her head.
“I swear that’s what I hoped for, Jottie,” Father begged.
But she shook her head again, and her face was like stone. She hated him for what he’d done, and there was nothing I could say, nothing I could do, to change it. I wasn’t sure what God would think about Father, but I prayed anyway, with my hands smashed between my legs.
“It was when I climbed in your window the next morning and saw that you’d cut your hair off, that’s how I knew he was dead. And I wished to God I was, too. I felt so sick, I wanted to die. It’d happened so fast, Jottie, it was only an hour, maybe an hour and a half, and right up until the last two or three minutes I thought it would be all right, we’d be fine. And then it was too late and I couldn’t stop anything; I couldn’t undo it and I couldn’t change it.” He pressed his hands onto his eyes, hard. “I killed Vause.”
She nodded, her lips folded tight.
“I knew you’d believe me,” he said, taking his hands away. “I
knew that if I told you the right way, you’d believe that Vause had done it alone. And then you’d stay with me. You wouldn’t leave me, and you wouldn’t hate me like Vause did, and I wouldn’t have lost every single damn thing I cared about.” He swallowed, and it looked like it hurt. “I wasn’t—wasn’t able to do anything else, Jottie.”
He stopped talking and waited. But Jottie didn’t say anything. She stared out into the leaves, not moving, not hardly breathing. I didn’t know what she was deciding; I didn’t know anything except I would probably be alone forever at the end of it.
“Jottie?” I said, as gentle as I could. She turned her eyes to me. “Jottie, we all three of us wish we could go back in time. We’d give anything to go back and change it. But we can’t, Jottie. We can’t.”
“How can you forgive him?” she burst out. “How? After what he did?”
I guess she meant Miss Beck and casting me aside and lying. “You’re right, Jottie, but what good is it? Rightness is nothing. You can’t live on it. You might as well eat ashes.” I glanced at Father, his bloodshot eyes and the stain on his pants. I loved him so. Once more, I tried to explain. “This is all we can do; it’s all we’re allowed. We can’t go back. The only thing time leaves for us to decide”—I picked up Father’s hand and held it tight—“is whether or not we’re going to hate each other.”
Father gave me a grateful squeeze.
Jottie watched the pair of us for a moment. “Willa, honey,” she said sadly, “wouldn’t it be better to give him up?”
I almost smiled. “Like you said, too late for that.”
She almost smiled back. “Listen to you,” she said, shaking her head. “Throwing it right in my teeth.” Her eyes slid over Father, calculating what she could bear. After a moment, she said, “No, you can’t live on ashes.”
He swung around, hardly breathing.
She heaved a sigh so deep it must have started at her ankles. “Poor Felix,” she murmured. “Poor old Felix.”
She reached out and took my hand, the one that wasn’t holding Father’s. They didn’t touch, they didn’t say another word, but we made a chain, the three of us, and that was fine. That was fine for a start.
In the quiet, I lay back and looked at the sky. It was a circle, what I could see, a circle of blue over our house. Just on the edges there were a few green leaves, ruffling a little, and some spots of gold that shimmered and waved until my eyes crossed and then closed and I went to sleep.
When I woke up, Jottie was still beside me, but Father was gone. I didn’t mind. He’d be back.
Epilogue
Jottie broke it off with Sol not long after that. He got married within the month, to a Maryland lady no one knew, but it didn’t last, and by the next summer he was back on our porch again, somehow managing to appear only when Father was away. Bird reckoned he spied on us from inside the sewer pipe, but however it was, he knew when he could climb the stairs and take a wicker chair. He must have spent a thousand nights that way, listening to Jottie and the rest of us and then walking back to his house alone. Even then I wondered how it could be enough for him, but I guess it was more than he had expected for himself, except during those few weeks when he thought he had won his war with my father.
Father came and went the way he always had. I never knew exactly what he was doing, and of course it was no use to ask him. I think he did sell chemicals, sometimes, but I don’t know. Late in 1940, he came home from a trip with his leg badly broken. He said he’d been thrown from the top of a railroad car by an enraged animal trainer. Jottie said she didn’t know anyone who was more likely to be thrown from the top of a railroad car than Father, but she also said that didn’t mean she believed him. She fussed over him with pillows and breakfast trays, and he laughed and let her, and I was as content as I would ever be in my life, because I knew where he was.
Father was never quite as fast after that. His leg hurt him, and he was getting old, too. He still disappeared, sometimes for weeks, but he didn’t come back with as much money, and I think what he got was hard-won. I remember one night—in 1943—he came home during a terrific storm. The electricity was out, and he mumbled something about how we should count our blessings and went upstairs to bed. We didn’t know what he meant until the next morning, when Jottie came into the kitchen looking like she was about to faint. She wouldn’t even let me see him for two days. I guess he’d been beaten up pretty bad.
Jottie picked up the slack. She continued working for the Writers’ Project—without their knowing it—until it folded. Some of the books were pretty silly. She wrote a book about water sports on the Potomac that nearly killed her. But writing grew on her, and after she was done with project guides and histories, she took up writing mysteries, most of them about a dead librarian who went poking her ghostly nose into other folks’ business. She sent herself into stitches writing those books, and she got four of them published, too. She said she was just trying to earn an honest crust, but I know she liked writing, and she liked being an authoress. I never in my life heard her laugh so hard as the day the Beacon Light Ladies’ Study Club invited her to come speak on the subject of “Modern Literature and Good Taste.” She went, though, and she bought a big black hat to impress them in.
The war began just as the Writers’ Project breathed its last, and then, of course, the farms prospered. Jottie had a lot to do to manage them after Emmett enlisted, but she set her hand to it, and before long Wren Spurling got the shakes every time he saw her coming. Once the war was over, and you could get gasoline again, Jottie and Father traveled. She said she’d had a circumscribed youth and it was time she saw the world. Father drove. They went to New York and California and other places. I always hoped they were running whiskey into dry states, because Jottie would have relished that, but I never knew for sure.
Those were good years for them both. Jottie lodged all of us on this earth, but no one more than my father, and he recognized it and was grateful. As for her, I believe she knew all along that hatred was a poor bone to chew; she had been trying to hate Vause Hamilton for years, and she saw, after it was over, that it would have dried her to dust if she’d succeeded. It was the same with Father. The truth of other people is a ceaseless business. You try to fix your ideas about them, and you choke on the clot you’ve made.
Besides, Jottie and Father had loved the same person, and each knew where the other went for dreams. In the years that followed the sesquicentennial, Father and Jottie came to talk about Vause Hamilton like he’d just left the room. Between them, he was a little alive, always, but they knew better than to weaken that faint heartbeat by speaking of him before others. He was theirs in private, and when I heard of him, it was only because I sat so quiet they’d forgotten I was there.
In 1940, Minerva surprised everyone—including herself, I expect—by producing a daughter, my cousin Elizabeth. Not to be outdone, Mae had a son, whom she insisted on naming Omar. Waldon almost put his foot down about that, but not quite.
Layla and Emmett got married on New Year’s Day of 1939, after she had finished grilling him on everything he had done in his entire life, Emmett said. He pretended to be exasperated about that, but he wasn’t. They held the wedding in our parlor, fresh-dusted for the occasion, with Jottie as the bridesmaid.
Somewhere along the line, I forgave Layla. I’m not sure when. On the day she got married, I watched her walk down our hall to the parlor, hanging on to the arm of the senator’s fancy suit, and I didn’t forgive her a thing. I thought about her lifting up her face to Father’s to be kissed, right there where she was walking. She thought about it, too, I could tell. She looked at me as she turned toward the parlor, and her face went pale. I was glad.
A few years later, it had all melted away. Why? I can’t tell you. Right after the war, Bird and I went to see Emmett one day. He’d gotten shot up in the Kasserine Pass, and he’d just had the second operation on his shoulder. He couldn’t drive or do anything, and Layla asked us please to come out and entert
ain him. So we drove up to White Creek, Bird and me, in Jottie’s new car. Over the course of our drive, we summoned up what we thought were some real amusing anecdotes, but when we saw Emmett there on his porch, looking like he’d been run over, they fled our mind and we just sat and stared at him. He’d always been so tall and strong, so generally big, and there he was, white as a sheet and shrunken up with pain. We didn’t know what to do. Layla saw our faces and came out and sat down. She started talking real nicely, asking us questions about school and our dates and Jottie and whether Father was away on business. At first we answered stiffly, casting glances at Emmett, but as she went on, we relaxed and started to talk. We told stories and made fun of people, like usual, and Emmett smiled, even if he didn’t talk much. But I watched. I saw him shift his good arm over the side of his chair so that one of his fingers touched Layla’s skin, and I saw her look at him. As we walked back along their drive to our car, I said to Bird, “I don’t hate her anymore.” I was kind of surprised to come to it.
“Yeah.” She nodded. “Seems like her days as a harbinger are over.”
For Jeffrey
Acknowledgments
Over the long course of writing The Truth According to Us, I found myself requiring expertise about—or at least a nodding acquaintance with—a wide array of 1930s phenomena: products, machinery, diversions, occurrences, and individuals. The quest for authenticity is a task both endlessly receding and endlessly fascinating, and though I was time and again obliged to curtail my ravening curiosity in order to get on with the job, research was one of the few unalloyed pleasures of my creative process. There is no thrill like the thrill of finding the name of the manufacturer of the top brand of cream separator in 1938. A full accounting of my sources would run about fifty pages, but I’d like to acknowledge here some of the larger debts.
Like nearly every author who has written about the Federal Writers’ Project, I relied upon The Dream and the Deal, Jerre Mangione’s lively history of that improbable program. William F. McDonald’s more sober Federal Relief Administration and the Arts was also valuable. For specifics about West Virginia, Jerry Bruce Thomas’s An Appalachian New Deal: West Virginia in the Great Depression supplied me with helpful information about the state’s resistance to Roosevelt and the New Deal. Likewise, Dr. Thomas’s article “The Nearly Perfect State,” about the political controversies surrounding the Federal Writers’ Project’s state guide to West Virginia, offered extremely useful background.