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“If you go to Shakerag and stir things up, there’s no telling what will happen.”
“I’m not going to stir things up, Ben. I’m going to help save a little girl.”
Ben’s sigh was audible. If she could see his expression, she knew it would be long-suffering. Though he blustered and tried to keep his best friend’s wife safe, Ben was proud of Cassie’s spunk. Whatever she did, he would support her.
“Dammit, Cassie.”
“Thank you, Ben.”
“For what? If you go up there, you’re fired.”
“I know.”
“I’m not kidding this time.”
“Bye, Ben. I’ll see you at The Bugle this afternoon.”
“I’ll be at the dedication, Cass.”
The dedication. One more reminder that Joe was gone.
If Cassie had her way, she’d wear slacks and a T-shirt to the dedication of the baseball field. Fashion meant nothing to her; comfort, everything. But there was her father-in-law to think about, dear, old-fashioned Mike Malone, who would be mortified if she showed up looking anything less than a proper lady, as befitted his son’s widow.
She put on a yellow linen sundress with a white bolero and matching pumps, even gloves, for Pete’s sake. A glance at the clock told her she was a full fifteen minutes early. She wished she could break herself of obsessive punctuality. She was so anxious that nobody be inconvenienced waiting for her, she always ending up wasting a lot of time waiting for them. And now that she was all dressed up, she couldn’t run out to her garden and pull a few weeds or start any little thing that entailed getting dirty.
Deciding to brave her former Empty Room, Cassie turned the doorknob. Her rocking chair beckoned—nothing to fear there—so she sat down to watch for her sister-in-law. The sight of her favorite pictures made her smile, but she couldn’t say she felt the sort of favorite-retreat contentment Fay Dean had predicted.
At the sound of tires, she looked out the window and saw Fay Dean coming up the walk with Mike. Cassie hurried to the door and kissed her father-in-law’s cheek.
“Mike, what a lovely surprise.”
“I wanted to come by early and see if there was anything you needed me to do.”
“That’s sweet of you, but I think I have everything under control.”
“Pshaw. You need some help taking care of Joe’s house. Where are those insurance papers?”
“I’ve already paid the house insurance, Mike.”
“I’ve told you, I’ll take care of all that, hon. No need for you to try to do a man’s job.”
“Daddy, Cassie’s not senile. The only thing she needs is an occasional shoulder to cry on.”
“Well, she for damned sure doesn’t need a psychiatrist. One of my mailmen saw her coming out of O’Hanlon’s office and asked if she’d gone mental.”
“For God’s sake, Daddy. Who gives a shit?”
Mike stormed off to the front porch, and Cassie said, “Leave Mike alone, Fay Dean. He means well.”
“I swear to God, Daddy’s going to drive us both crazy.”
“I don’t know about you, but it wouldn’t take much to push me around the bend.” That brought a laugh from Fay Dean, which was exactly what Cassie intended. Though she waded knee deep into every controversial cause, she tried to avoid personal conflict.
You never say what you’re thinking, Joe had told her that awful summer she’d lost her third baby, the summer it felt as if he had vanished to the moon and she was left behind trying to see into outer space. Yell, scream, cry … Just, for God’s sake, don’t shut yourself off from me.
“Are you ready?” Fay Dean linked arms, and Cassie pushed the uncomfortable memory from her mind. “Let’s get this over with.”
They climbed into Mike’s steady Chevrolet sedan, and as they drove the few blocks to the baseball field, Cassie found herself struggling to recall the exact shape of Joe’s jaw, the way his dark hair had felt against her cheek, the way he’d pull his harmonica from his pocket and start playing so his music came through the door before he did. Even the smell of Joe’s old baseball jacket could no longer bring her husband clearly to mind.
Blistering in the sun beside Mike and Fay Dean, Cassie was thinking how love can waylay you when you least expect it. She was thinking how one minute you can have your future mapped out and the next you’re arguing over whose fault it is you can’t carry a baby full term.
And if the sound of a blues harp happened to float by on the breeze, as it was doing now, you might actually believe it was a sign. Was it Joe, telling her he’d always loved her, even during those hard months after they’d lost the third baby and drifted apart?
Last night she’d gone outside to stand under the stars. Venus had shone down on her, a heavenly reminder of the grace that had enabled her and Joe to get past their hurt and come back together.
Shored up by memories, she went onto the baseball field where the mayor would call Joe a hero.
Leaving her gloves and bolero in the car and clutching Joe’s posthumous award under her arm, Cassie entered The Bugle’s offices on the corner of Spring and Court streets. They were in a venerable building in the center of town with twelve-foot tall windows and ivy climbing the redbrick walls.
Joe used to say she could live at The Bugle, and it was true. She loved the clatter of the presses and the smell of ink. Cassie settled Joe’s plaque on the corner of her desk and her coffee cup on a ceramic trivet painted with rainbows. Give Your Soul a Bubble Bath, it proclaimed.
Searching her phone book for the number, Cassie dialed Betty Jewel Hughes.
“Hello.” The woman at the other end of the line spoke with dark, honeyed tones that made you want to sit outside in the sunshine and listen to the universe.
It turned out the woman was not Betty Jewel, but her mother, Queen Dupree. Her daughter, she said, wouldn’t be home till late that afternoon. Though Queen sounded both ancient and anxious, she finally agreed for Cassie to come to Maple Street.
Cassie glanced at her calendar. “I’ll be there today at five.”
A dying woman doesn’t have any time to lose.
Seven
SITTING IN THE PASSENGER side of Sudie’s old car, Betty Jewel wondered if it was possible that miracles are not prayers answered but the answer to prayers you didn’t even know you should pray. Maybe she should have left off praying for a cure for cancer and the freedom for her daughter to walk into the Lyric theater downtown and sit anywhere she pleased. Maybe she should have been praying that her life would be ordinary. Wake up, cook breakfast, plant your collard greens and watch your child grow up. The things millions of women took for granted.
She had been on the front porch swing, wrapped in one of her mama’s quilts and sick from her soles to her scalp, when Sudie’s ten-year-old Studebaker with most of the black paint missing had chugged to a stop in front of her house. Out stepped Merry Lynn wearing a pink hibiscus-print swimsuit—Esther Williams, except colored. Sudie came around the car, her sprigged-green-print skirt swinging as she walked, and her bosom, large for a woman her size, supported by enough black latex to cover a barge.
“Grab your suit, Betty Jewel,” Sudie had said. “We’re going to the old swimming hole.”
“I can barely walk, let alone swim.”
“Sudie took the day off, and don’t you dare try to say no.” Merry Lynn marched onto the front porch with Sudie where the two of them made a packsaddle of their crossed arms and joined hands. “Hop on.”
“I can walk.”
“Not today, you don’t,” Sudie said. “Get on, Betty Jewel.”
“I’m not doing a thing till you promise I won’t hear any talk of finding a cure in Memphis.”
“I promise and so does Merry Lynn, though I can tell by that stubborn look she won’t say so. Now, get your butt in gear and get on this packsaddle before I put it in gear for you.”
She climbed aboard her not-too-steady seat and they hauled her off to the car, thankfully before she toppled off and added broken bones to her list of troubles. Merry Lynn raced back into the house, then returned with a quilt and her blue swimsuit, the one Betty had bought in Memphis the year she’d married the Saint.
“I’m not wearing that. I don’t have any meat on my bones.”
“If you don’t want to wear it, we’ll all swim naked. How’s that, missy?” Merry Lynn fanned herself with a church fan she’d pulled out of her straw handbag. “Start the car, Sudie. I’m melting.”
“Well, roll down the windows.”
“It won’t help till you get moving.”
By the time Sudie had turned the car and headed out of Shakerag, Betty Jewel knew this outing was exactly what she needed.
Surrounded by the hum of tires and the scent of pulled pork Tiny Jim had sent for their picnic lunch, she waited for her first sign of the river. It came to her as the scent of childhood, water so cool and deep it smelled green.
Around the bend, the Tombigbee meandered through ancient blackjack oaks and tall pines, cutting a path that created sloping grassy banks and carved sharp knolls into the red-clay hills.
“Remember that summer I said I was quitting college to marry Wayne?” Sudie found their old haunt, a paradise canopied by spreading tree branches and hidden by a bank of wild privet and honeysuckle. She parked under the deep shade.
“I said you were crazy.” Merry Lynn reached for the quilt Queen had made and the towels she’d brought.
“And I said you should follow your heart.” Advice Betty Jewel would take back if she’d understood how we color another person with our own heart’s desires. What we see is not the truth, clear and unvarnished, but a fantasy built of imagination and stardust.
“Forget that heavy stuff and let’s go have some fun,” Merry Lynn said. “Get the picnic basket, Sudie.”
As they lolled on the quilt, eating pork barbecue, they were reeled backward to a place where the dreams of yesterday might still come true. Betty Jewel could almost believe she’d turned back time.
Afterward, they stretched out on the quilt, side by side, and called out the objects they found in the clouds. Merry Lynn found two angels and Sudie found a frog. When Betty Jewel found a heart, she thought of the locket and felt a pinch of pain that stole her breath.
“Let’s go in the water.” Sudie stood up and peeled off her skirt. “Merry Lynn brought inner tubes. It’ll be like old times.”
“You two go on. I don’t have the strength to struggle into latex.”
A look passed between her friends, and they both started stripping.
“Betty Jewel,” Sudie said, “if you don’t want to see me down on all fours buck-naked, you’d better peel off that dress before I do it for you. I don’t have all day.”
She thought about the cancer that steals all your dignity, and friends who give it back.
“Why the heck not?” She tried to stand up and found herself lifted by Sudie and Merry Lynn. They unbuttoned her dress and folded it onto the quilt, then led her into the shallows and helped her into a black rubber innertube, the kind they’d used as river rafts when they were children.
With the cool green water lapping over her, Betty Jewel leaned back and closed her eyes. For a blissful hour she vanished into the realm of childhood where boundaries between what was real and what was imagined vanished, where things lost might be found, and anything at all was possible, even a future.
When Sudie’s car chugged to a stop on Maple Street, Queen was waiting on the front porch with four yellow plastic glasses of iced tea.
“Did ya’ll have fun, baby?”
“We took her skinny-dipping, Miss Queen.” Merry Lynn plopped on the porch steps with her tea.
“I ain’t never done that, but now I wisht I had.”
Sudie sat in a rocking chair, leaving the seat on the swing to Betty Jewel. “I can’t stay long. I gotta get home and fix supper for Wayne and the kids.”
True to her word, Sudie herded Merry Lynn into the car and drove off ten minutes later, both of them waving out the window, calling goodbye, and Betty Jewel was so grateful for friends who pick you up when you fall that she could do nothing but wave.
“Where’s Billie?”
“I give her a dime an’ she done gone to the movin’-pichure show. Gone see that Tarzan swingin’ on a rope.”
“Lord, Mama, she can’t walk home by herself.” Ever since Alice’s murder, only the foolish let their little girls walk home in the dark.
“I ain’t dum. Tiny Jim gone pick her up.” Queen studied Betty Jewel over the rim of her plastic iced-tea glass. “That newspaper lady’s a comin’.”
“What newspaper lady, Mama?”
“Said her name was Bessie. Miss Bessie Malone.”
Betty Jewel felt like a dying star spinning through the sky, leaving burning bits of herself behind. “Not Cassie. Tell me it wasn’t Joe Malone’s wife.” Queen just sat there with her lips pursed. “You know I can’t talk to her.”
“Maybe it’s bes’ is what I been thinkin’.”
“No, Mama. I can’t talk to her.”
“Lies’ll eat you up inside,” Queen said.
Betty Jewel turned her face from her mama, then wished she hadn’t. Wisps of Alice spun slowly around the yard, phantom legs floating over the grass that needed mowing and arms spread like the broken wings of a little brown bird. But the thing that made Betty Jewel turn away was Alice’s eyes, deep as Gum Pond and clear as mirrors. Look too long into Alice’s eyes and you’d see yourself; you’d see your past bound to your future, the sight so disturbing it could paralyze you.
“What time is Cassie coming?”
“‘Bout five.”
Betty Jewel thought of her options. Hide. Not answer the door. Bar the door and not let her in.
Or let her in and tell the truth.
She’d rather walk into the darkness of her own death than face Cassie with the truth.
Eight
BY THE TIME SHE Left The Bugle, Cassie’s yellow linen sundress was a wrinkled mess. As if that weren’t enough, it was blistering hot in the car. She rolled down her windows, and the first thing she noticed as she drove into Shakerag was the abrupt change from paved streets to dirt roads. Sinking into a pothole big enough to swallow a beagle, her tires spun. As she stomped on the gas, dust swirled through her open windows and settled over everything inside, including Cassie.
Saying an unladylike word that would have given her father-in-law a heart attack, she bumped her way down the gutted road. No wonder unrest was brewing. If she had to travel on roads like this every day, she’d be mad, too. Add to that the mean wages and scarcity of jobs for people who lived in places like Shakerag, and Cassie had to wonder if Ben was right. Was she stepping into a boiling cauldron?
She forged forward, pulled by her own stubborn will and the smell of barbecue that made her mouth water and gave her the shivers all at the same time. There was no escaping the scent of roasting pork on the north side of town. Except on rare occasions, Tiny Jim kept his smoke pits going around the clock.
His blue neon sign was flashing, and, as she drove by, Cassie caught the strains of a soul-searing harmonica. Real this time, not the stuff of myth and magic. The musician could be anybody from a blues legend to some teenage kid with a gut-punched feeling and a harp in his pocket.
The harmonica walked all over Cassie’s heart. It was Joe’s second love. That’s one of the things she missed most: the sound of blues at unexpected moments. She could be in the tub or putting a casserole in the oven or arranging roses she’d picked, when all of a sudden the blues would pull her heart right out of her chest.
