The Maid's Version Part 3

Alma: "I figured as much."

"He treated him with salves and ointments repeatedly."

"I saw him come over repeatedly, and I saw the itty-bitty hole in the arm he treated, tooa"it might have hurt plenty for a couple of days, but it surely weren't no kind of burn."

"Dr. Thomason noted that it was a small burn in scope but acute, and he managed to minimize the scarring."

"There never was no salve or nothing of the like on the bandages I took out to the rubbish after he come over, though, and done his treating. None of that yellow mess that you spread on burns, or the red kind, either. Only sometimes a little old spot of blood, and that only on the first visits.") "They told me whatever testifyin' I had to say would be held secret."

"Yes, well."

"So them official muckety-mucks all amount to liars, too."

"I believe you have cracked from so much woe, but even cracked you surely know he had not a thing to do with the tragedy. Not a thing."

"I know what I know, ma'am, and there ain't no way to not know it now."

"You've been snooping in my home ever since a I realize that a and we have been so very kind to you, always, haven't we?"

Alma stood, dismissed, fingered her hair into place, and stared fixedly toward the staircase, then as she departed said over her shoulder, "Ma'am? You'll want the long kitchen matches to light that lamp."

She found occasional day work available in the more modest homes of other victims, sympathetic families who were also suspicious of various people but chose to stay silent in the face of enormous evil. Alma could not tolerate even sympathetic cowards for long, fearful that close contact with the surrendered might by example draw her own spirit into a puny presentation of itself, and to keep her spirit stout she did at times talk aloud about the silent and surrendered with mocking inflections as they sat inside the room she presently cleaned, sorting them out in understandable slurs as they paled, then reddened, and amidst the responding babble she'd leave their employ in the next flus.h.i.+ng seconds, broom dropped to the floor, laundry washed but not hung on the line, and walk directly to the pit the explosion rendered. There she would bend at the waist and shriek her terrors downward past the scorched debris and brick wreckage to the mucked bottom and beyond, where she needed most to be heard.

Folks said, "Alma believes she knows why and who but can't do a thinga"which is a black curse for a body to carry no matter how you say it."

She let her hair grow too long for kitchen work by simple forgetfulness, her mind had been trained elsewhere for so many weeks and months, but when she took notice of the new length in a restroom mirror decided on the spot to let it grow on forever, having an immediate hallowed sense that hair of an otherworldly length displayed a public, devotional reverence for the dead, for the dead and her quest to achieve for certain of the dead justice or blood, one or both, but especially both. Her clothes had never been special and now they were grimed by neglect and the upchucked spatter absorbed by plain cotton print as she tended a dying son who could hold nothing much down. She had no steady job and all kinds of miseries, and folks avoided her or became briefly blind when she walked past on the square with hair sprayed about her head neither combed nor bound. When so shunned she many times would follow closely on the heels of those who chose not to see her and whisper or deliver in singsong approximate injunctions from the Bible: "Masters share onto your servants that what's A-OK and fair, hear?"

Or: "The righteous fallseth seven times and is rose up standin' at scratch again by rooster-crow tomorrowa"what do you think about them apples?"

Or: "The tongue of the just is chose as be silver, and ain't none of you got tongues of silver."

The fallen, though, would still give her work, and Alma did at times swab and scrub inside establishments she would not have entered before, lowly and vile joints wherein neither her att.i.tude nor station were held against her, and sweeping was sweeping and a bowl of stew and corn bread could carry a soul. These brigands and outcasts and a.s.sorted wh.o.r.es were sinners, yes, of the gravest kind, but they feared not the opinions of the highfalutin that held sway in this town about themselves or others. Alma pinched together what earnings she could from Cozy Grove and the Willows and Aunt Dot's, and at Jupiter Grocery laid grubbed coins on the counter to again secure the smallest fatty ham hock, an onion and more navy beans for the boys.

John Paul would take to sleeping outside the shack on those nights Sidney scratched most horribly after air and tried to inhale deeply but came up shallow. His straining chest and thin bones rattled like chains born far apart inside him that clanked together now as he emptied. Leukemia, no remedy but prayer, and don't count on prayer to be heard when broadcast from this room in this shack during this mean year of our Lord. (John Paul would never again attend church nor pray privately from the time Sidney's sickness accelerated through the completion of his own.) Sidney lay on an uneven cob mattress in the center of the floor, eyes shrunk to slits or suddenly drawn too far open, skin the color of spilled milk disappearing into a slow creek. John Paul wept and held on to Sidney's feet to warm him. Wept and laid a wet cloth on the fevered forehead to cool him. Wept and ran outside to flee his brother's rattling chains and the strangling stink and kept running. Alma tended her dying boy as well as she could with only a mother's hands and beans in pork fat and no special medicine of any kind. James paced on these clenched nights from wall to wall and front to back and smacked himself in the face. He opened and closed his Barlow knife as he paced. He smacked and opened and closed and at times, as if whispering to a nearby cohort, repeated, "You're right. You're right." Sidney lay among kin where he'd laid for weeks with ebbing breath and did not ask anymore for food or a cure, but stared up with resigning eyes and asked the ceiling or whatever to let him go, C'mon, just let me go, go now, go soon, go.

He robbed banks. He called himself Irish Flannigan, a blatant falsehood and redundancy, as his true name was not Flannigan but Bosworth, and he was only guessing that he might be a pint or two Irish on his mother's side. She was always nattering to him about their forebears and one time or another suggested that a dab of this or a dab of that from nearly every white-race bloodline of the world had been introduced into his veins, so he could claim kins.h.i.+p with just about everybody in charge if it somehow got him a leg up. It would be as Irish Flannigan that he achieved a bright but fleeting notoriety, became for a glorious time loved, feared, hated, idolized. He and the Irish Flannigan Gang robbed more banks in the breadbasket than any of his permanently famous brethren ever dida"Pretty Boy, Dillinger, Machine Gun, Baby Face, the Barkers. He outrobbed them all, but somehow his deeds never clung to the national narrative of that era, never got much publicity in the big magazines back east or newsreels, and near the end of his life he groused to his guards and chaplain often about obvious unfairness in the dispersal of fame and that pure-dee boondocks boys like himself from any field of endeavor seldom if ever received the recognition their attainments merited. He always did know such things were stacked tilted toward sating the pet wants of the citified and precious, never truly forgot that, but still, in his all-American heart he couldn't keep from a Eventually the chaplain arranged for a reporter from the KC Star to visit the outlaw footnote in Jeff City as his death day neared and listen while he spoke. Irish said many things that made it into the newspaper, the salient section of the article being this, "I come out of Protem, Missouri, hungry, hungry as the rest, I guess. Maybe just a little bit more. I done what I done. I won't say I didn't. I knocked over so many banks I count *em in tens, and that number is three. I spent it when I had it, brother, danced with every girl worth dancing with and stuffed my gut with the best eats, too. I had fun. I did kill them I confessed to killing. I never wanted to kill none, none at all, but folks turn daffy on you sometimes, of a sudden think they've been sprung from a comic strip or radio show and get their dumb heinies shot. Those things I done, okay, but I never did kill no sheriff in West Table down there. That wasn't me. It was the late Eldon Haines from Tulsa. We both of us sat in the same car, I'll give you that. The sheriff they had down there was too friendly. Just too gol-durn friendly. We was stopped at a garage waiting on new tires and he come over to the car smiling, looking down to the plates, which were Georgia plates. He cozied up to the window and asked if we ever had been on the Oconee River, and Eldon cut him down. Cut him down right there in the alley before the old tires was switched with new, two shots, then stepped out and popped an extra one in his head. I want it known by all I never done a thing to the man except not see it coming."

At age ten John Paul Dunahew was on his own and raided gardens for supper after midnight. He'd been without all other kin since the twelfth of November when Alma became bizarre beyond civic tolerance and was taken to live at the Work Farm (Sidney had very recently completed his haunting, brutal, audibly and visibly grotesque death inside the Dunahew shack, James had carried away only a Barlow knife with a bent blade and stolen gloves as he fled the region), and he chased anything that resulted in coins, delivered two of the three daily newspapers (Locator mornings, Scroll afternoons) and both of the weeklies (Gazette, Journal) and kept his few belongings (schoolbooks, a Big Chief tablet of paper with pencil stub, two sets of underwear made from gra.s.s-bleached flour sack, another s.h.i.+rt made of the same, and a big wooden spoon) in a burlap bag. The Work Farm expected him to supply four bits a week toward his mother's upkeep and he did so and delivered it on foot, though he was seldom allowed to visit privately with her as she was not currently resident within her skin and they weren't sure who or what was. He could not then and would not ever seem able to rest or sit idlea"rest was dangerous for the poor, he knew that, too many thoughts of ordained and burgeoning unworthiness came to the impoverished when idle and ruined them thoroughly from the inside out. He knew that before he could say it and made himself stay on the move even when there was no place worthwhile to go. He rose in darkness (all my childhood and after he sat smoking Pall Malls on the back stoop and drinking instant coffee before the sun arrived) and hustled at any task that promised payment. He applied to caddy at the country club but was discouraged because of his size, and in a matter of only days became the evening rack boy at Clellon's Billiards when old reformed Mr. Clellon realized that he was Buster-the-drunk's youngest son. Poker games were allowed upstairs, moon and home-brew beer were sold from the cloakroom on the main floor, and the sheriff never came inside the place while wearing his badge. John Paul earned two cents a rack, and learned to say Good shot, Nice combination, or Great shape on that one, without looking up from whatever book or magazine he was reading at the moment. In short order he came to be considered something of a mascot by the sporting gents of town. (I did once, when rambling the nighthawk realm underage in marine green, encounter a table of deeply wrinkled and gin-blossomed ancients who heard my surname and ordered me a double whisky without asking if I'd take a drink before launching into fond windy reveries of Clellon's and Clellon, Grandpa Buster and Dad.) Many times he received tips of two or four bits from country rakes who knew his circ.u.mstances, but more often he was stiffed by those who felt two cents a rack was generosity enough. Clellon was a heaped and rounded man who theatrically overlooked John Paul's presence every night at closing time and locked him inside as though he believed the place empty, allowing the boy to sleep in safety beneath the three-cus.h.i.+on billiard table nearest the stove. He'd been nine, then, still, and felt protected by the apparent goodwill of the dubious. In the morning Clellon would open the front door and say, "How'd you get in here before me?" He would then count the pickled pigs' feet in the jar on the counter by the cash box, count the pickled eggs in their jar, and sometimes make an announcement along these lines, "I wouldn't eat more than three of each of them pickled things a day, myself. More'n that many a day and the brine'll tan your stomach-sack into stiff leather, and leather ain't what a fella wants down there when settin' on the throne of a mornin' to shed night soil." He almost always brought a bologna sandwich and an apple from home wrapped in newspaper and would set that lunch in front of John Paul as the sun spread early light. "Now, you deliver all them papers, kid, but don't forget school or I'll go cut me a hickory switch."

Unmothered for now and alone, John Paul would not allow himself to slide from school and sink beneath his struggles, but attended almost every day. Cla.s.srooms and study meant escape as his coltish mind was sent wandering the world by books and sharp teachers, and that wandering was in those days his chief pleasure and the cla.s.sroom his place of fullest relief. John Paul enjoyed lining up to fight at Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, exploring the woods of America with Lewis and Clark, traipsing beside a belled brown cow through fragrant meadows high in the Swiss Alps, or following candlelight flickers along secret cobwebbed pa.s.sageways found underneath all great castles and foreign cities.

Closely after John Paul turned ten, Mr. Clellon was dropped by a gigantic pain in his chest and buried in rain. The dug earth graveside diminished in the deluge and leaked downhill as the preacher from his wife's church spoke, the piled dirt lessening as mud with each word, so the service was abrupt and the shoveling started early. John Paul watched Mr. Clellon disappear beneath shoveled glop and felt hated by the sky and trees and rain. He owed some big shot somebody from an earlier life, he guessed, or he'd eaten a biscuit sitting in the outhouse and thus fed and nourished the Devil and G.o.d saw him chewing and won't let it go. He'd done something worth punis.h.i.+ng, that was proved by ever-mounting evidence, buta John Paul kept four dollars and seventy-three cents in a drawstring Bull Durham tobacco sack and had no place indoors to sleep. His various jobs provided him with one dollar and sixty-five cents a week, out of which he paid for Alma, lightly fed himself, mostly lemon drop candy and raisin bread, and tried to save at least twenty cents. He wandered the town by night, sometimes slept beside the old shack now boarded tight and abandoned or under the loading dock behind the Scroll Building. He stood at the back entrance of the Two-Way Cafe or the Stockman's or Dr. Bach's Pharmacy and Soda Fountain for handouts and did at times receive edible offerings from each. He was one evening near the train depot tackled by a pair of men wearing those drab wool jackets issued by the CCC, who took the Bull Durham sack from his hands, then tossed him over a wooden fence when he followed them yelling. He received in that skirmish a gash that angled through his left eyebrow and gave him a scar some ladies later said added just enough intrigue to his looks.

He took to raiding gardens in full darkness, and no summer meal was sweeter than one so gained fresh from warm dirt and still alive in the mouth. A favorite patch to plunder, easy as b.u.t.ter, and not far from the square, was a very large and immaculate garden and clutch of fruit trees maintained by a comically mustached old man called the Roos.h.i.+an. He spoke greenhorn English with a slow suspenseful drag as he searched for the proper shaping to give words he'd already started to speak. At times he would be heard declaiming loudly in gobbledygook about irksome concerns of some sort, to which only his wife could listen with comprehension. The Roos.h.i.+an's house at the north side of the garden was squat and cloaked in shadow by freely spread nature, vines sized thin to burly, with meshed tendrils and shoots, climbed over windows and up the walls to the roof, where tree limbs cluttered closely above and a skim of moss had settled on the s.h.i.+ngles. He knew how to grow anything our climate and soil permitted and his crops were beautifully made beneath the sun and abundant.

The fence around this plenty was three rusty strands of barbed wire that had been stretched by several seasons of po' boy raids and sagged deeply between tilted posts. Even a little kid could hop through at the sagged places. Even a little kid lugging tomatoes or corncobs could hop over running away. A little kid carrying too much might not hop high enough, though, and John Paul was hooked by a barb on the top strand and swung to hang upside down. The plunder fell away from him and he shrieked as the skin of his left calf slowly tore and lowered him by the shriek. His shrieks carried in the still night. The Roos.h.i.+an came to his door and stood with a spot of lamplight glowing behind him while holding a fat book open with a finger inserted to mark his place.

He made a disagreeable noise and bent to light a lantern, then came into the yard following that light through the cultivated rows and rows of green things that had leaves and rustled and dirt that lay turned and soft underfoot. The moon was no help. He wore bib overalls without a s.h.i.+rt and bent to John Paul at the far fence line and held the lamp close. A patch of flesh was coming off the boy's leg and had only a thin attachment to one rusty barb remaining.

"Don't you now move, huh? Fence push in still." He reached near the tearing yet snagged flesh and suddenly grabbed the sliver of skin and pinched the boy clear. A shriek, more blood. "Best hurt fast that way, boy."

John Paul in lantern light did see a white wad of himself stuck to barbed wire and the sight of his own meat hanging there doubled the pain. (Baby brother and me, when rug rats, sat at Dad's feet often to play our fingers across the irregularly shaped but smooth expanse that never grew skin to ooh and ahh over the creepy silken feel and make him repeat the story.) He was carried inside and eased onto a kitchen chair. The wife clucked and shook her head and went to work on the blood and the wound. John Paul in a strange kitchen of strange smells watched the bandage take on his own splashed color.

The Roos.h.i.+an was Venyamin Alekseyevich Cherenko. (Dad misunderstood the Russian naming tradition and thought the big whoop was the patronymic in the middle and tagged me at birth with Alekseyevich. Mom argued and argued that carrying such a name during the Cold War would be a great burden, but the name became mine and I've never wished for another.) His wife was Masha, small and light, and from the first she seemed pleased to tend John Paul and renewed by his presence.

Mr. Cherenko said that night, "This garden for me and the woman to eat, yes? Yes? But we don't wish hunger on none, boy. Hunger not mischief, we feed. Hunger you got, boy. Not mischief. We wish hunger on none."

John Paul was fed heavy dark bread and a soured sort of soup that was then exotic and challenging to him but would become a favorite, and carried to a back room, laid in a small bra.s.s bed with the shape of another relaxed into the mattress. Cherenko stood over the wounded boy and opened his arms to indicate the s.p.a.ce. "Our son lived. War came, he goes, there's cross stuck in dirt over somewhere don't mean to us nothing. Settle here, boy, to sleep. Go goodnight."

And from that moment John Paul, with no real discussion of the matter or concern about legalities, did stay with the Cherenkos as a replacement son, lived with them for years until his own war arrived and called him abroad, staying on there even after Alma was in 1938 deemed well enough to be hired away from the Work Farm by July Teague, and came back into the neighborhood of his life.

Mae Poltz and her children were run from town within weeks of the blast when Freddy's true name and past became known. A city boy called Plug who'd served Egan's Rats and rented the building had to be somehow involved, that's the sort of senseless devilment men like him were wont to amuse themselves with when uncaged, but his wife kept her lip b.u.t.toned and couldn't be coaxed to repeat the rhyme nor reason of the horror and make a clean breast of it. She claimed ignorance, and never wavered from her claim, but that much ignorance of the man she'd married and shared her midnights with had to be willful, just had to be, nothing else rang true, and she and her toddler brood were escorted to the train depot on a day of bleating weather and given tickets to a whistle-stop in central Kansas.

"If ever you think about coming backa"think on it some more and don't."

When the Second Citizens' Commission Inquiry was called (after months of agitation from motivated pests named Dr. and Mrs. Mark Shelton, Haven McCandless, Bud and Frieda Johnston, Ted Steinkuhler, July Powell Teague, and Alma DeGeer Dunahew) and scheduled for December ninth of 1941 (never held, never rescheduled) in order to deal with long-dormant but revived anger concerning still-unanswered questions and haunting rumors of provable guilt that were again reaching critical ma.s.s, Mae (now Mae Claar) was found in Fort Collins, Colorado, and asked to return. Her response suggested the commission members were out of their cotton-picking minds if they thought she'd willingly return, but she added, "We all know who it was got seen running the wrong way that night. When she blew up, everybody in town who could run did run to the fire and help except this one tall man in a white s.h.i.+rt and necktie, who when the sky got bright was seen by two housewives at the least and one maid and one old doctor jumping over fences and running real desperate through backyards going the exact opposite way from all the rest. Why is it we never have heard from him?"

The second summer after the blast, in the flat meadow across Howl Creek where the Skateboard Park is now, a Sat.u.r.day baseball game was in progress in midafternoon, and one of the Heaton brothers. .h.i.t a homer that rolled between distant saplings and down the bank into the creek bed. Two barefoot squirts on hand watching were sent to retrieve the ball and came back fast, without it.

"Where's the ball?"

"Somebody's down there."

"So what?"

"His head is not on him right and he's got his face stuck in the water."

Both teams and all three spectators made quick time to the bluff above the creek for a look. Several voices said He's dead, he's dead, he's got to be dead laying that way. A center fielder in his middle teens named Jack Gutermuth stepped to the brink, squinted downward and announced, "That's that preacher."

"Which preacher?"

"The one that said my uncle deserved to be roasted alive *cause he could dance."

"That's him?"

"Yup."

"Well, I reckon he's in a red handcart to h.e.l.l by now, about to get fried up good in his own greasea"he'll keepa"it's only the seventh inning."

When Sheriff Adderly and Deputy Bob Jennings arrived postgame they shooed everybody back from the creek bank so they could study the situation closely. They wandered around on all sides of the body, squatted to their heels and turned the face up. One large whitish rock had left its outline impressed in mud short of the water's edge and come to rest bloodstained and brain-spattered in a trickle near the body. The skull had been crushed and made almost triangular.

Deputy Jennings said, "There's a word for what happened to that rock, there."

"Lifted?"

"No, a better word."

"Heaved?"

"Not that one, either."

"Dislodged?"

"That's it. That's the one I like for thisa"dislodged."

"So, the way you suss this scenea"Preacher Willard stumbled over a root or something else up there, tumbled all accidental down to here and dislodged this big ol' rock with his head?"

(Fifteen years later, Vance Bullington, who'd lost a boy and a girl at the Arbor, did on what he thought was his deathbed but wasn't quite say to his surviving daughter, Billie, "That preacher with the big mouth? In nineteen and thirty-one? I'm who done for him."

"I always have heard you most likely were who did that, Daddy."

"You have?"

"So has everybody."

"He was hunkered in the crick, there, catchin' crawdads with ham fat on a string, and a I'll take full credit for that killing now, I guess."

"You already have the credit, Daddy, everywhere but in the newspapers."

Billie added, "Daddy was a purty big gol-danged liar sometimes, told me he could fly airplanes backwards using hand mirrors and had once set up light housekeeping with Mata Hari over by Poplar Bluff *til she got to boring him silly with her nosy questions, and a bunch of horsefeathers along those lines, so take his confession or leave it. I personally think this once Daddy spoke true. I kind of hope he did.") "That's how I read it, Sheriff. That there's way too big of a rock to dislodge with your head, you know, and walk away after."

"So it's just that simplea"Preacher tripped up there on somethin' I don't see and dislodged too big of a rock down here with his head."

"And died."

"Do I hear an amen?"

And there were the anniversary confessions. In the first decade after the conflagration perhaps a dozen complete or merely suggestive confessions were taken, all easily refuted, and the confessed would be returned to homes where relatives dealing with the Great Depression promised to watch over their lonesome addled kin and spend more time with them on Sundays if they could manage it, though it seemed nearly to blaspheme basic heavenly intentions to feed crazy folks when sane ones went about starving. Two of the more eager confessors were next-door neighbors who became perennials and their testimonies expanded in compet.i.tion over the years into picaresque recitations of unforgivable guilt and delicious subplots of scurrilous intrigue everybody heard in detail one way or another, and plenty came to look forward to hearing yearly the advances delivered as both men tried anew to talk themselves into being hanged before the other. When one neighbor in 1937 drank raw milk too late and died, the other did sadly resign himself to not ever being hanged by others and gave up all confessing.

And there were the accusations and denunciations also delivered in cl.u.s.ters surrounding the anniversary date: Chuck always has liked fire too much to be left alone anyplace with matches but might have been on that daya"I don't got any way to know for a fact, I was at Jam Up Cave, myself, that night, but his eyes sure get wide seeing flames. Or: She and him had been stealing from the factory payroll, I'm pretty sure of that, since they had patent-leather shoes a little too rich and s.h.i.+ny for East Side, don't you know, and ate hunks of beef meat when we had greens and fatback, so they likely did the bombing to throw attention away from their own wrongs until they could leave for California with the loot, which they did do within only a year or so. Or: My husband has been odd since maybe a week before then, could've been a month, and if I ask him since to do things around the house when he's sitting in his chair, he won't even look up at me but says in this deep scary voice suspicious kinds of stuff, like, If I put a dynamite bomb under the kitchen table maybe you'd leave me be a minute while I read this book, which is a horrible waya

I wore Ruby's hat whenever I played Robin Hood. I found the hat in Alma's dresser drawer and promptly saw the swashbuckling potential: It was green and narrow, peaked along the center line, edged with a thin black cuffa"the cuff was clearly embroidered for girls with tiny sorts of flowers, but I dismissed them as blooms in my mind and considered them rapier nicksa"holding a long reddish feather that leaned backwards. Robin Hood was my top idol (rivaled only by Little Joe Cartwright, Bob Gibson and Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox) and I would open Alma's entrance to the Teagues' main house when I thought it empty and leap about from chair to davenport to ottoman, waving my sword, hurdling coffee tables and low antiques. I slid das.h.i.+ngly in socks across the hardwood floor and didn't break too many things. The house was a ma.s.sive Victorian and it didn't seem like small things I broke while resisting tyranny in this room or that room or one of the others would be missed anytime soon.

July Teague knocked one afternoon on Alma's door when Alma napped and called me into the main parlor. She was still beautiful, had been and would be so at every stage of life, even a boy knew that when in her presence he faced a blessed beauty, and she dressed nifty, always, since she knew she was watched for flaws wherever she went. I looked up at her with her red lips and big smas.h.i.+ng eyes and elegant hair and confessed with a tremble before she even asked if I'd done anything wrong, and she began laughing.

"You're lucky you're one of the cute kind of Dunahew boys, know it?"

"Yes, Mrs. Teague."

"Cute boys shouldn't ever admit they know ita"that peels the s.h.i.+ne right off the cute. And call me July, please. I've told you that umpteen times."

"Aye, aye, July."

"*Aye, aye'?a"what s.h.i.+p were you on, sailor?"

"I haven't been on any, yet. Dad was, though."

"I know your daddy, Alek. I knew your daddy's daddy when I saw him, and your mom's people, too." Mr. John Teague owned three car dealers.h.i.+ps in different Ozarks towns and they owned more than one house and he was not in this house more than in any other, seemed to much prefer the log place on the Jacks Fork River, but was as nice to us when home as she was. July drank bottled beer in the kitchen with the curtains drawn and smoked cigarettes on the side porch behind the honeysuckle trellis and did both with natural-born style and obvious pleasure. I enjoyed watching her do anything, because she did everything the way you hoped to see it done. She played cribbage and mah-jongg with the ladies afternoons at the country club, golfed and swam in the pool there, and her skin tanned to a fetching glow. I didn't quite get what the big deal about girls was yet, specifically, and July was older by a long stretch than my mother, still she gave me feelings I didn't recognize or know where to put. "That's actually why I asked you out here, sailor. I hadn't noticed the broken things yeta"thanks for folding so easily, and confessing and all, I appreciate that, but don't break any more of my things or I'll paddle your behind. That was Harlan and Rosalee on the phone a minute ago. They want Alma to bring you by tomorrow for lunch."

"Okay, I'll tell her."

"I can carry you over there on my way to the club, if she'd like."

"She'll want to walk, no matter how hot."

"You're right. You are so righta"jeez, don't you just love that old battle-ax?"

No place in town was too far to walk and Alma took me there. She delivered me to the door but wouldn't come inside and wasn't begged to do so, either. She sat waiting in the yard under the shade trees on the bench beside the horseshoe pit. Hudkins smelled of old and fresh cigars and decades of breakfast bacon, and I surrendered to the embracing smells about two steps inside the door. It was the merged aromas of lives well led, of warmth and permanence, air flavored further with gun oil and lavender perfume by a hard-nosed old sportsman and Ma-ma, who admired things English, read one or two novels daily, and put artworks on the walls depicting ladies in plumped and layered dresses standing in the garden among spread flowers and cubist hedges, overdressed and bewigged gents in blue coats or red a.s.sembled in serious purpose around maps on a table, and hushed views of the Lake District at dawn.

Grandpa Harlan took me to his paneled den and made me slap-box a couple of friendly rounds with him as usual, then look at his newly acquired and mighty handsome maple-stocked twenty-gauge he pulled from the gun cabinet and had me hold and aim. He put me in a headlock and rubbed a soft Dutch rub, pinched two knuckles around my nose and squeezed out a buffalo nickel, gave me a slurp from his can of beer. We went to the dining table when called. Ma-ma had dragged out the heavy black skillet and served pork chops fried with white pan gravy over mashed potatoes, crowder peas and pole beans, blackberry cobbler with a scoop of vanilla for dessert. On the plate it looked to be more than I could eat but I ate it all and almost asked for more. That day it was as ever at Hudkins a slow, wonderful meal, with p.r.i.c.kly banter and quick lunging s.h.i.+fts of subject matter, droll jokes, rolled eyes, and laughter. Harlan and Ma-ma took me to the door once the dishes were cleared and said next summer I'd stay with them in my own bedroom and ride the horses all day, every day, any day I wanted.

Maybe a block away from Hudkins, trudging in the smothering heat, Alma, pink-skinned and sweating gushes, asked what Harlan had had to say about her behind her back this time. "He didn't say anything," I said. Fingers jumped to my ear and yanked until I could feel it about to rip from my head. "Except you're batty as a loon!"

"I knew he would."

"Arthur was his very good friend, his personal pal, and loaned him bank money every spring to stock enough feed at the mill, and did so much for folks around here. He saved the bank when thousands of others went under."

"That's no reason to look away if he does wrong."

"He said it was a horrible jumbo accident, or maybe it wasn't such an accident, we'll never know, not all the answers, and don't waste my summer worrying about old-timey sad stuff."