A Gracious Plenty

  But they clanked the ladder against the house and woke us up. Papa met them outside, just as I stuck my head out to see what was going on.

  The boy on the ground ran away, yelling terrible things, but Papa caught the one who’d been climbing.

  Papa had strong arms and shook the truth right out of him.

  “Why my daughter?” Papa asked him.

  “Just ’cause,” the boy said.

  “None of that,” Papa scolded, the boy’s hair waving as Papa jostled him. “Why my daughter?”

  And I called to Papa, “Just let him go,” because I was worried that the one who’d run would come back with friends. Because I didn’t really want to hear the boy’s answer.

  “ ’Cause—you know—of the way she looks.”

  “And how does she look?” Papa asked him.

  “She’s …”

  “How does she look?” Papa asked again. And the boy twisted beneath his grip.

  “She looks like somebody’s bride,” he answered, and he began to snicker.

  But Papa was quick about turning that laugh to a whimper. “Tell her you’re sorry,” he demanded, “or I’ll jerk this arm out the socket.”

  “Sir, I think you’ve done that already,” the boy said. “What’s your daughter’s name?”

  He didn’t even know my name. I think that’s what did it for Papa—because he didn’t give the boy time to apologize. He began beating him, and the boy ran off, with Papa chasing him, furious.

  And then when I knew I’d embarrassed Papa, too, then the world was too much to bear.

  I wandered around the cemetery, wishing to be buried. I studied the ground, and the bones in my neck grew curved, my spine caning. I walked through the stones to the river and back, and my world was as silent as I needed it to be. It was good that I needed it to be.

  And after a while, with the world so quiet, with just the crickets chirping and the toads, I began to hear voices in the nights. I’d sit up in my bed, with sliced ham on my face, the veil from Ma’s dress over my head, and I’d think I’d hear her singing. I’d think I’d hear whole conversations, just faint. Sometimes I’d hear voices saying my name.

  Being so lonely, it was only natural for me to track down those sounds.

  So I started sleeping on Ma’s grave, but the voices were always just out of reach. It was like hearing someone through a vent, someone in another room. And I wasn’t sure if the voices were outside or inside my head. It took a long time to tune my ears, to cut off the outside and dive to the sounds.

  Then one night, I chased down my ma’s voice. She said, “Something smells like meat.”

  “It’s me,” I said. “Don’t you see me?”

  I took off the veil and peeled back the ham, and I saw my ma there, though it was like I saw her through a screen. I saw my ma digging mud from beneath her toenails. Ma squinted her eyes and said, “Finch?”

  “Hey, Ma.”

  “You’re here?” she said.

  “I guess so,” I answered.

  “For good or just visiting?”

  “Visiting,” I answered, though I wasn’t wholly sure. “Who’s that crying?” I asked.

  “Marcus Livingston,” she said. She was exhausted from hearing him already.

  “Is it really that bad here?”

  “Not so bad,” she said. “Except I miss you,” and she reached to kiss me, but there was no way. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m just so sorry.”

  “It’s okay, Ma,” I told her.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” she warned, but I stayed.

  “There’s a price,” she said. “If you borrow time here, you’ll have to pay for it.”

  “I don’t care,” I told her, and she comforted me, with just words, because I couldn’t reach her.

  Oh, if I could have reached her, if she could have reached me. I lamented all those nights when she came to my bed, her hands on my face, feeling into my collar, tracing ridges. I wished I’d grabbed her then and held on. I moaned above her grave for the touch I couldn’t feel, rolling like a cat in the dirt where grass had not yet grown.

  I’M GOING TO green Finch’s ivy,” Lucy declares.

  The workday is over. The Dead are having free time, playing poker and making necklaces with clover flowers. But Lucy’s not ready to quit.

  “Her ivy’s green already,” the Mediator replies. “And besides, it’s almost dark.”

  “I won’t be gone long,” Lucy tells her. “The new leaves, they need speckling.” And she darts across the graveyard, hurdling over tombstones, following me home.

  I’m tired. I spent the whole day laying bricks around a war vet’s grave. It was something his grandson had seen in a magazine and requested. He wanted an ugly little pen for his grandpa and sent a check to pay for the bricks, the mortar, my labor. But there is no way to charge him for the ache between my shoulders and in the middle of my back at the one place I can’t reach.

  “I don’t know where you get all that energy,” I holler to Lucy, who’s now up ahead.

  “I borrow it from the universe,” she answers. “Didn’t you take physics? Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It just changes shape. There’s a law about it. It goes something like that.”

  “I see,” I tell her. “Listen, I’m glad for the company, but when I get home, I’m going in to take a bath.”

  “That’s fine,” she says. “I’m just here to green your ivy.” And she giggles to herself and does a somersault as she makes her way into my yard. She’s just like a child sometimes, begging for my attention.

  I go on inside and run myself a tub. I put in eucalyptus soap and lots of warm water, and I sink to my shoulders there and steep.

  “Hey, Finch,” Lucy calls from outside the window.

  “Hmmm?” I say.

  “You asleep?”

  “Nah,” I mutter.

  “I need a favor,” she whispers.

  “What?” I ask. “Why did you follow me home?”

  “I need you to talk with Mama again,” she tells me, seriously now. “I need for her to know I killed myself.”

  When I open my eyes, I can see her in the mirror, her elbows propped up on my windowsill, framed in the ivy growing around it.

  “Lucy, how many times you gonna ask me to do this?”

  “Until she admits it,” she says. “She’s gotta admit it.”

  “I got one question for you: What does it hurt for her to think you were murdered? If it’s easier for her to accept murder over suicide, then why do you care?”

  Lucy doesn’t answer me at first. I see that she’s studying my body, staring at me laying there, and I almost pull the shower curtain when she catches herself.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “Your scars are just so—”

  “Ugly,” I answer for her, and I lay my wet washrag over my burned shoulder, like it’s big enough to hide me. I’d need five or six washrags to cover all I need to hide. I’d need a whole towel.

  “Stop it.” She laughs. “Let me see.”

  “No,” I say, rolling my back to her.

  “Finch, let me see. They’re not ugly.”

  And so I remove the cloth and return to my back, almost defiantly, almost daring her to say the wrong thing.

  “It’s strange not having a body at all,” she tells me. And it takes me a while to digest that, because I can only see her when I remember the shape she held in the past. But that’s about my eyes—not her presence.

  Then she asks me, “Have you ever flown in an airplane?”

  I shake my head no.

  “If you ever get a chance, fly. From the air, the ground looks a lot like your skin. You wouldn’t believe how intricate and detailed and beautiful …” and she trails off, color spreading up her face.

  “Tell me about your mama,” I say to get her back on track.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Lucy sighs. She buries her head into her arms, then looks back up, into the mirror, speaking to my image. “Do you know how many
times Mama took me to the beauty parlor to get my hair teased up and sprayed, when all I wanted to do was jump on Charles Belcher’s bed? Or how many times she made me walk around the house with books on my head when I wanted to play softball? I swear, Finch, it just makes me so mad.

  “Do you know that I took piano lessons instead of playing softball because I couldn’t show off softball skills to judges in an auditorium? I sat in front of lighted makeup mirrors and learned where to put the blue eye shadow and where to shade with purple. And if I got a zit, she screamed at me for eating chocolate. Of course I ate chocolate! And then if I gained a few pounds, she’d keep me home from school to make sure I didn’t eat. If I fell off the side of my high-heel shoes, she’d make me wear them to school. It’s like I did everything that she wanted—because she insisted on it—and most of it was against my will.”

  “I hear you,” I say. “I really do. But tell me what that’s got to do with hurting your mama this way. Is it really that important?”

  “Yes,” Lucy replies. “Yes. Because the running away I chose. And my life up north might not have been all that impressive, but it was still mine. And my death was my choosing, too. It might’ve been a bad choice, Finch. It might’ve been the worst one I could make. But it was mine.”

  And I want to ask her if she really thinks it matters anymore which choices were hers, which choices were not. Even I know that things happen for reasons, if you let them happen.

  But she’s Lucy Armageddon, and she’s stubborn with my heart.

  “Do you love your mama?” I ask.

  “Of course I love her,” she says.

  VACATION BIBLE SCHOOL has just let out, and the children race down the street towards Lois Armour’s house. It’s her day to serve refreshments, but she doesn’t do it in the Fellowship Hall like the other hosts. She’s prone to seizures and afraid to leave home. So she invites the children onto her concrete lawn, one age group at a time. The punch and pound cake sit on her metal glider chair, and a small girl is pushing the chair back and forth, watching the punch slosh as Lois greets the sixth graders who’ve just arrived.

  Her hair is bleached and loopy from rollers, her makeup on thick. She wears a sundress that clasps tight to her chest, and a little mound of fat pokes up above it in the back.

  “Hey there, Aaron,” she says. “How’s your mama?” and ushers him in.

  Then she looks back to the child spilling punch. “You quit that right now, Randi Flanagan,” she says.

  Without transitions, she’s back to her greetings, patting each child on the shoulder. “Hey, Heather and Shereen and Stephanie,” she says. “Come on in.”

  And I’m behind the sixth graders, on my way to the store, but not willing to miss an opportunity.

  Lois smiles and kisses and pinches cheeks. And just when she reaches the last child, she sees me, like a bad dream, standing behind a boy I don’t recognize.

  Suicide, I mouth without sound, and walk on.

  I’VE HARDLY SWALLOWED my lunch and gotten none of it digested when Leonard bangs on the door.

  “Well, hey there, howdy,” I say. “You back for another melon?” I know why he’s here, but even I’m surprised that Lois has done her tattling so soon.

  “Finch, I got to take you in,” he replies. His voice is quiet, almost apologetic, and I notice that his eyelids are puffed up like he’s either slept too hard or hasn’t slept in a week.

  A skanky kitten leaps over from the swing onto the screen door, clawing as she climbs. She cocks her head at Leonard, like she’s showing off. “Shoo,” I say, and push her down. And when I kick the door open, Leonard backs up, surprised that I came right out.

  “You’re jumpy today,” I say.

  I’ve got my watering tin in hand, and I make my way around the porch rail, saturating window boxes and hanging baskets until the liquid drips from the bottom.

  “See this Pathos?” I show Leonard. “Would you believe it grows two to three inches a week? I’m gonna see if I can’t get it to drape all the way around the porch like a window dressing. Wouldn’t that be pretty?”

  “Yeah,” he agrees. “Finch, I ain’t lying. I need you to take a little ride with me. Lois Armour’s done taken out a warrant.”

  “For what?”

  “Harassment,” he says, tired. “We’ll get it straightened out, but you got to come with me.”

  I have never ridden in a police car before, but it’s nothing remarkable or exciting, neither one. Leonard’s car stinks of cigarette butts. He doesn’t put me in the back, though. He rides me there in the front. He turns on the radio as soon as we get in the car, but the knobs need adjusting. All the way to the station, I listen to static.

  I don’t get arrested. I get “a talking-to,” where they fuss at me for aggravating a sick woman. I’m asked to sign a paper saying that I won’t go within some distance of Lois Armour—maybe fifty yards. I can’t remember the details. I’m not to call her on the phone or send her letters. And I have to sign a paper saying I understand the rules. There’s a copy of the form for the police, a copy for Lois, and a copy for me. Leonard hands me a pen and I write “Lucy Armageddon” in the space where it says “Signature.” The fools don’t even notice. An officer named Phillips tears it apart, hands me my copy, puts one in a file and another one in an envelope for Lois.

  “You’re free to go,” the officer tells me. But I’m ten miles from home, with no way to travel and nobody to call. So Leonard has to drive me back. He acts irritated about it, and when he grabs my shoulder to lead me to the car, his grip is just short of a pinch.

  Being touched makes me dizzy. I feel the places he fingered long after his hand has lifted.

  Leonard’s mood is terrible, but no worse than mine, and when he turns the radio back on, I reach over and switch it off.

  “It’s the truth,” I tell him, nearly hollering. “She did kill herself. And part of the reason she did it was ’cause she had no one to turn to—least of all her half-wit ma, who ain’t had a seizure in years! And it’s for Lois’s own good that she admits it.”

  “Why do you care how Lucille Armour died?”

  “Because she killed herself for a reason, Leonard.”

  “We don’t know that she wasn’t murdered.”

  “Read the report.”

  “How did you read it?” he asks curiously.

  “I didn’t. Lucy told me about it.”

  “Goddamn it, Finch. Would you quit that shit? Would you just quit it? Even if she did kill herself, she surely ain’t talking about it now. Okay? So drop it.”

  We drive on for a while, passing farms and hardware stores, going over a little bridge and a bigger one, and I mutter, “She couldn’t live with herself. She couldn’t bear another day with the secrets she was holding.”

  And Leonard hits the brakes and pulls over to the side of the road just past the Tredegar County Library. The shoulder is soft and we nearly wind up in a ditch. When we’ve been stopped for a few seconds, Leonard speaks, without turning his head toward me and without taking his hands from the steering wheel, his hairy knuckles wrapped white around it.

  “Now listen,” he says. “I’ve had a real bad day. There’s things going on you don’t know. And to tell the truth, I don’t give two hoots and a damn whether Lucille Armour shot herself in the head or got blasted by a pack of gypsies. My mother is in the hospital with a nervous disorder. My father is threatening to put her in a nursing home. Them cats you gave me have little white worms wiggling out their asses and falling on my bedspread. My water heater is broke, and I got the ladies’ Sunday school class in a blue-headed tizzy over the bum that died a few weeks back.”

  “William Blott?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” Leonard growls. “You been talking to him, too?”

  “Sure enough,” I claim, and he shakes his head and cranks the car again. I can’t tell if he’s more annoyed or calming down, but then he resigns himself to a hollow laugh.

  “Well, when you were talking, did he te
ll you he was a queer?”

  “I don’t believe that for a minute,” I say.

  “Oh yeah,” Leonard continues. “He was as queer as they come. Did he tell you he paraded around in ladies’ panties?”

  I don’t have an answer for that one.

  “Did he tell you, Finch, that he was the one who was stealing women’s underpants off the clotheslines back a year or two ago? Poor old Reba Baker recognized her own undergarments in his things.”

  “You sure he was the thief?” I defend. “There’s a lot of white bras and underpants for sale at Sears and Penney’s.”

  “Well, we can’t exactly prosecute him for it anyway, now can we?”

  “Then don’t accuse him.”

  And right when we get to the cemetery, he says, “That bastard didn’t even have a house on the property. Musta had a dozen little pop-up campers back there. All of ’em old and dirty—filthy nasty. We haven’t even been through his stuff. The ladies’ Sunday school class went into one camper and found all their underthings, and that was the end of it.”

  I hurry to get out, but I can’t find the door handle at first. When I finally get it open, I’m red in the face and about to start cussing.

  “Shoot,” Leonard says. “If you talk to William, ask him if he had anything to do with the break-ins over on China Street.”

  I slam the door hard and head for Lucy’s stone.

  THE DEAD HAVEN’T come in from their day’s work, and I haven’t got the energy to meet them. I wait at Lucy’s grave for a bit, and then I make my way across the hill to admire the Blott memorial. It doesn’t even need a tree or a shrub planted to beautify the place. It’s regal all on its own.

  And I’m not meaning to eavesdrop. I’m really not. I’d been thinking William was out conjuring a breeze—forgetting that he’s not light enough yet to leave the surrounding area.

  I’m not meaning to snoop. Most of the Dead know me already and know that while I can’t reach them, I’m sometimes with them. But William has taken what the Mediator said too literally, perhaps. She’s told him that the living world walks a contiguous plane. He hasn’t been around long enough to learn there are always exceptions.