A Gracious Plenty

  “You can have your pick of rooms, Miss Nobles,” he tells me. “And in the morning, if you’ll strip the bed of your sheets, I’ll have the housekeeper wash them.”

  Then he takes me down the back staircase. At the bottom, there’s a room where Mrs. Livingston is sleeping, just off the kitchen.

  “The invalid’s room,” he says. “We don’t want her climbing the stairs.”

  “Len?” a woman’s voice calls. “Is that you, Len?”

  “Yes, doll,” he answers. “Mildred, we have company.”

  “We do?” she titters, and I hear feet tapping at the floor.

  Then Mr. Livingston does a strange thing. He grabs the doorknob and holds it closed even though his wife works at it from the other side.

  “Leonard!” Mr. Livingston calls. “Come escort Miss Nobles back to the study. If you’ll wait here—” he says to me, and inches the door just a crack and wedges himself inside “the invalid’s room.”

  I meet Leonard halfway. “I’m leaving,” I tell him. “I’m going home.”

  “Wait,” he says. Then he pauses and looks at his shoes. “It was a bad idea, wasn’t it? I’m sorry, Finch. I just thought—”

  “Just hush,” I tell him. I can’t hear him apologize again.

  I open the front door and stand there, barely making out my pickup across the lawn. I look at Mr. Livingston’s truck and Leonard’s squad car and think of how I’m going to drive—and where I’ll go. The weather’s worse already and there’s a shutter on a window clanking, a screeching coming from somewhere else. And though the rain comes in, splashing inside, speckling the wooden floor with pinprick dots, I don’t close it. The weather’s just too bad to leave.

  “You mad?” he asks.

  “No,” I say.

  “Why’re you mad?”

  “I’m not mad,” I answer. “I’m uncomfortable.”

  “Me, too,” he tells me. “I thought it’d make it better—for you to be here—but I guess not.”

  “You shouldn’t be uncomfortable here. He’s your father, Leonard. Work it out.”

  “It’s not that easy,” he says.

  “I have easier conversations with my parents and they’re dead,” I tell him. “Why do you let him treat you that way? Either stand up to him or get away from him.”

  “I just want him to be proud of me,” he says.

  And that’s the last straw for me. “You are too old to be acting so childish,” I say. “You can’t spend your life living for somebody else. And besides that, your father’s not going to be proud of you. He’s proud of a moose head, Leonard. He’s proud of the woodwork. But you’re not an antique, or a limited edition, and you’re not imported from a foreign country. He’s got more pride in his liquor cabinet than he’s got in you.”

  “That’s unfair,” he says.

  “Hey, I got an idea. Maybe if we took you to a taxidermist and got you stuffed, then he’d be proud. Maybe he could stand you in the corner and hang coats on you, and when guests came, he could say, ‘This was my son the policeman. He spent his life trying to make me proud.’ ”

  And as I fuss, the wind picks up. The wind blows so hard that I can’t even close the door when I try. It blows so hard that it knocks over the wooden coatrack and peels up the edge of an area rug.

  “I wish I could send you home,” Leonard says, and I can tell I’ve pissed him off.

  “I’m going,” I tell him. “I don’t want to be here watching you get treated like shit. You can’t even stand up for yourself. That’s pathetic,” I say.

  “I know,” Leonard says, and he drops his miserable head.

  “No, you asshole,” I tell him. And I get right in his face. “Don’t let me talk to you that way! You got to stand up for yourself. Can’t you see nobody else is going to?”

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “Quit apologizing! You make me sick.” I head down the steps, down the walkway, and there’s hail now, bouncing on the ground, falling so hard from the sky that it pings on my scalp. And I’m mad at everybody, Leonard included. I’m mad at the Livingstons and the Mediator and Papa and Lucy and especially at the Poet, who I can occasionally glimpse shooting the balls of ice from a BB gun, shooting all around the air.

  “Okay,” Leonard yells back, and he’s chasing me down, right behind me. “You want me to talk hard, I’ll talk hard. You’re a fine one to be criticizing me, when you’ve spent your whole life ashamed of your face and running from everybody. You’ve made it ten times worse for yourself because you never gave anybody a chance, always expecting them to mistreat you. You hold grudges like nobody I’ve ever seen, Finch. Hell, it’s taken you this long to forgive me for the first day we started school—and I ain’t convinced you’ve forgiven me now. And that’s why you got nobody. I might have a problem standing up for myself, and I might not be worthy of anybody’s pride, but I do the best I can, and at least I got some friends.”

  “I got friends,” I reply. “Plenty of friends. A gracious plenty,” I tell him.

  “Name them,” he says, and he turns me around and starts walking me back toward the house. And I start reeling off people from the cemetery—the same damned ones I’m mad at: “Lucy and William and the Poet and Marcus”—I even say his name, Marcus—“and the Poet and the Mediator and Ma and Papa and Lucy and William and Rulene and Jed.” I could go on and on.

  “They’re all dead,” Leonard tells me. “You can’t exactly call ’em and tell ’em to come pick you up, now can you?”

  “You’d like to think that,” I say. “You’d like to think it’s all in my head, but it ain’t, Leonard.”

  And I think we could go on fighting for hours. I think we could accuse each other and feed off the rain until we wound up nothing but blood and shreds of muscle on the steps. I think we’d enjoy it. Maybe the hail’d beat us to pulp.

  But then Mrs. Livingston comes out, in a robe and slippers. Her face has fallen and her hair has grayed, but she still carries a regalness about her. It isn’t so hard to imagine her on the steps of the courthouse, baby Marcus in her arms.

  “Well, hello,” she says to me, and walks right out onto the walkway to touch my cheek, the burned one, stroking her thumb against the burn. “I remember you,” she tells me. “You were a member of my childhood class.”

  And it startles me so much to see her there that way, to feel her touch, that I just say, “No.”

  “Mother, this is Finch Nobles. She was in school with me,” Leonard tells her, and he shoves us all back up the steps and inside the door. I drip onto the shiny wood floor.

  “No,” Mrs. Livingston says. “I remember this face. She’s the girl who stole my poodle in New York.”

  I shake my head.

  “Oh yes, you did. That was in 1945, and we were living on Twenty-third Street. And I had the prettiest face in the city and yours was the crudest, of course. So you stole my prancing poodle.”

  “Darling,” Mr. Livingston says, leaning against the mop he’s fetched from somewhere, “we never lived in New York. And we never had a poodle.”

  “Besides that, Finch wasn’t even born then,” Leonard says.

  “What did you do with that poodle?” she asks me. She twists the hem of her robe around and around in her hand while she waits for an answer, lifting it so high that I can see her thin white thighs.

  “I fed it painted Easter eggs,” I play along. “When it died, I buried it in the yard and grew a poodle tree.”

  “Oh,” she says, delighted, “I have missed you so much,” and she comes to hug me.

  I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve had arms thrown over my shoulders or a face that I could feel so close to mine. I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve been able to smell someone so clearly, but Mrs. Livingston smells of powder and camphor, and I close my eyes and breathe it in. But she’s a short woman, her head resting against my chest, and when I look down, I see that she’s staring at me, her eyes blue like Leonard’s, a wild dog’s eyes.
>
  We’re still huddled in the foyer, peering out the door, and Mrs. Livingston says, “This is quite a storm, isn’t it? I’ve never seen such a storm. Did it drop you off here?”

  I nod.

  “It’ll blow out soon and we can all go to bed,” Mr. Livingston replies. “Come on in and let’s have a beverage.”

  Leonard offers his mother his arm, and she takes it. I follow behind and take a seat in a rocker.

  Mr. Livingston pours clear liquid over ice cubes in thick smoked glasses. When he hands me mine, I take it but don’t sip.

  “That rocker,” Mr. Livingston tells me, “once belonged to a nursemaid from Wales.”

  “It did not,” Mrs. Livingston argues. “It was the rocker I used to rock Leonard and Marcus.” She throws back her drink, swallowing it all in one gulp.

  “The two aren’t mutually exclusive, my dear.”

  And Leonard clears his throat.

  “You like Dickel?” Mr. Livingston asks me.

  “Oh, yes,” I reply, though I don’t even know what I’m saying or why. I don’t know if I like Dickel or not. But the words just come out to join all the other strangeness.

  He laughs at me, and I flush, and then the thunder cracks down above the house so hard, it rattles the beams in the floor. Lightning glows at every window, and the lights flicker, flicker, out.

  Mrs. Livingston giggles; Mr. Livingston says, “Damn!”

  Leonard lights a candle, then another, and he looks at me when he blows out the match.

  The house is somehow more tolerable by candlelight, with just shadows and not whole faces. But the wind picks up and it becomes harder to hear each other. The wind screams in the distance.

  If I was at home, I would stretch out on the ground and wait for the storm to end. I’d hold myself onto the ground and listen to the earth suck up the rain. And if limbs fell on my back or head, they’d just be like brothers and sisters wrestling and playing acrobat, playing rough. And I wish I could get out there, even in the storm. The ground, the earth, will always hold you, will always hug you back.

  “Maybe you should read the Bible to us,” Mrs. Livingston says to her husband, her voice suddenly sharp, the giddiness gone. “You used to read the Bible during storms.”

  “I haven’t read the Bible in thirty, forty years—however many years it’s been since Marcus died, that’s how long it’s been since I’ve read the Bible. Can you not remember that, Mildred—that I gave up on the Bible when Marcus died?”

  “That’s true,” Leonard agrees.

  But I know Leonard would agree with anything his father said.

  “Well, that’s ridiculous, don’t you think?” Mrs. Livingston asks me.

  I study Leonard for a clue, but he’s stiff, careful, and doesn’t look at me, so I just shrug.

  “The Lord who took my son will not get my money or my prayers, either one,” the old man mutters.

  “The Lord didn’t take Marcus,” Mrs. Livingston tells him matter-of-factly. “I did. I helped him get quiet with a pillow and he never made another sound.”

  In the silence that follows, I wonder what’s more shocking, her murder confession or her tone. We are all stunned, for one reason or another.

  “Mother!” Leonard says finally. “That’s not true.”

  “That’s insane!” Mr. Livingston adds. “Darling, that’s not what happened. So don’t say that. We know what happened to Marcus. He died in his sleep. He simply failed to thrive.”

  “He was thriving fine,” she insists. “His lungs were certainly thriving.” She hops up and pours herself another drink, a bigger one. “You’re the one who told me to hush him, Len. You had a speech to make in Richmond the next day. Don’t you remember? And you couldn’t sleep—”

  And I am thankful for the candlelight, for the smallness of it, for the flicker that doesn’t make me look at any of them too carefully, for too long. If a crime has happened, I didn’t see it. I don’t know it. I do not want to know.

  “And poor little Leonard,” Mrs. Livingston mocks. “He ate until he blew up like a little pig after Marcus died. We took him to a psychologist,” she whispers. “He was so nervous, he couldn’t help playing with himself.”

  “Mildred!” Mr. Livingston yells.

  “Did I say something wrong, Len? Did I say something you didn’t like?”

  “Mother!” Leonard begs.

  “It’s okay, son,” she replies. “Between your brother going away and the little burned child you kept dreaming about …”

  Then she turns to me, puts her hand over her delicate mouth, says, “Oh, hello,” her voice quieter now, her sharpness filed flat.

  “Miss Nobles, I am certainly sorry for all this,” Mr. Livingston says, rising. “You understand that Mrs. Livingston isn’t well. She’s suffering a decline and doesn’t mean the things she’s saying. And now, if you’ll excuse us, I think it’s time to take her back to bed.”

  He scuffs across the room, seeming older and less spritely than he was in the morning. But his wife shrinks from him and begins to cry. The closer he gets to her, the more she wails, and when Mr. Livingston reaches out for her, she slaps his hand the way a cat might, if it didn’t recognize tenderness, or if tenderness wasn’t intended. She bristles, slaps his hand away, and sobs into cushions.

  Mr. Livingston stands there, pathetic, calling, “Mildred? Mildred!” He is scared to touch her again.

  Leonard says, “Mother? Aren’t you tired? Do you want me to help you to bed?” But he keeps his distance, too.

  Finally, I go to her, and reach for her arms and pull her up before she has a chance to think about it. “Come on,” I tell her. “Come show me your room,” and I lead her there, in the dark, just feeling the walls.

  For some reason, all I can think about is what Reba Baker told the newspaper reporter about treating William Blott the way she’d treat Jesus. And even though I’m not too hyped up about Jesus in general, it seems like a good policy, to try and treat everybody good, and it’s the only thing I can figure to do with Mrs. Livingston right now.

  “I remember you,” I tell her. “I remember being little and seeing you at the dedication of the courthouse. That’s been a lot of years back. Do you remember that day?”

  “Oh yes,” she says, sniffling. “I had a new hat. Len brought it to me from Chicago.”

  “A pink one,” I tell her. “And you looked so special that day. I was sitting on my papa’s shoulders, watching you, looking at your fancy clothes.”

  “Will you play with my pretty hair?” she says in a child’s voice.

  “If you’ll come back to bed,” I tell her. And I lead her there with my hand on her head, her hair matted in the back. I push her forward.

  And I feel my way around “the invalid’s room,” straightening her sheets and helping her climb in. In the distance, I can hear the wind, howling out, and it sounds like a screaming baby, a screaming trumpet, a screaming woman.

  “I didn’t mean to kill him,” she says. “I loved him. He’d just been crying for so long, and I was so tired.…”

  The glass jiggles in the windowpanes, and I wonder if it would matter to baby Marcus if he knew his mother hadn’t meant to kill him.

  “I think I need to open these windows,” I tell her, because I’m scared that the panes might blow out. I pound and pound to get the window up, and once I do, the storm dips inside.

  There’s a tree just a few feet back, a black cherry tree, and it rains its fruit inside her windowsills. The tree arms beat on the windowpanes like fists, knocking, but like an intruder, not a friend, and I’m not so sure we’re in a safe place. I’m thinking we might be better off in a place without so many windows.

  I tell Mrs. Livingston that I’ll be right back, and I step into the hallway, where I hear Leonard and Mr. Livingston cursing and shouting.

  “She did not smother that baby,” Mr. Livingston bellows. “She’s out of her mind.”

  “We don’t know,” Leonard insists. “She keeps saying
it.”

  “You are an insult to this name to even speak that way about your mother. You are no son of mine!”

  And then I hear glass breaking and wood splintering, and I run back to Mrs. Livingston.

  But the glass and wood were from somewhere else. Not here. Here, Mrs. Livingston kneels at the window, her head stuck out. She holds the window up with her shoulders and catches cherries on her tongue. And she is laughing, deep from her chest.

  The lightning pops around us and lights the room in glints, from behind, from the side, from every window, all around. I call to her to come back, but she can’t hear me. She’s saying something, but I don’t know what, in the high, buzzing twirl of screams and hums. There is noise all around, the rushing of a train, and I can only watch from the doorway as the sky lights up and shows a tornado spinning toward us, glowing in lightning like a devil.

  And after the lightning, when it is pitch-black again, the sound getting closer and deafening, I do not go to Mrs. Livingston or try to save her. There’s no time. I crouch down in the doorway and wait for the screaming to take me.

  Lightning flashes again and there’s the sound of shattering, cracking, exploding. There’s nothing to see but whirling quickness and a hint of something else, a baby spinning in the mass, leaning out from it to wave, and spinning around again, like a globe, his dark hair flying off like wheat in wind. He darts in and out of the whirling, like a tongue, someone else’s tongue, mocking us here in the living world. I think I hear him laugh above the high, whistling roar, but then I close my eyes.

  “Marcus,” Mrs. Livingston screams. “Mar-cus!”

  Then in an instant, so fast that there’s no time for surprise, the floorboards explode in one gigantic splintering, and I am hurled into the air, along with the bed and the table and Mrs. Livingston. When I land, I find roots beneath me, the roots of the black cherry tree. I settle with wood against my lower back and no wind in my lungs at all.

  And it takes me time to find my air, to make sense of what has happened. I hear bricks tearing apart, scraping against one another, and I think the house is surely crumbling, being lifted away. It isn’t until later that I realize that the house has been spared. It’s the original kitchen that has disappeared into the night with the baby and the storm, with the sounds of the horn.