Harvestman Lodge (61 page)

“You work at the newspaper … do you know that my picture was on the front page yesterday? Me and some of my friends from the dance school … we’re going to be dancing with the Crosswaite Cousins in the July 4 thing downtown, and they took a picture of us in our red, white and blue outfits!”

Eli was chagrined to admit he had not seen the photo. “I work for the paper, but I’m involved in a different project than the day-to-day newspaper, and some days I’ll miss a particular edition. I’ll be sure to go back and look at that one.”

“I’ll get it now,” Megan said. “Daddy picked up ten extra copies, so we’ve got plenty.” Megan darted to a different room and returned half a moment later with the paper in hand. She handed it to Eli, who gave the photograph the sought-after admiration and praise.

“Thank you,” Megan said, faking embarrassment. “That’s so sweet of you to say.” She gave Eli a smile that revealed the inevitability of a future career as a breaker of hearts.

The pizza, perfect and aromatic, was conveyed by Melinda and her mother from kitchen to dining table.

“Megan, dear, could you go get the pitcher?” Dot said. Megan scurried in and came back with a big frosted pitcher, filled to the brim.

Eli wished the pitcher contained beer rather than iced tea, but made his peace with the reality that, in the house of Beerless Ben Buckingham, such a thing was not going to happen. Ever.

PARTING FROM MELINDA WAS a different experience for Eli this time, saying his goodbyes there at her own front door, with her family inside. He wondered if they were being watched around the edge of a curtain. Melinda clearly wasn’t worried about it; she gave Eli the hardest, most intense, deepest kiss he’d gotten yet. And to his astonishment, her hand wandered in a way he never would have anticipated.

“I wish we could be together the whole night,” she whispered to him.

“Just say the word,” he replied, almost ready to throw her over his shoulder and cart her over to his car and then to his apartment. All that would get him, probably, would be the same kind of bullet-through-the leg treatment from Ben Buckingham that Rawls Parvin had received, and he knew it, but it almost seemed worth taking a shot at it.

Almost. At heart, though, Eli was not prone to take the caveman approach to romance. Especially not with Melinda, the first woman he’d truly loved. He mentally thanked God, right there on the porch, that relationship with Allison had gone south. At its best it had been nothing approaching what he had with Melinda. Even with the boundaries Melinda insisted he respect.

“Say the word?” Melinda replied. “You do know what the word is, don’t you? Or actually, the words?”

“I do.”

“Exactly right. ‘I do.’ When we get that out of the way, the whole night, and everything that goes with it, will be ours.”

“You’re way too old-fashioned, Melinda.”

“Yes, I am. And I’m worth it, Eli. I promise you, I’m worth the momentary frustration.”

“Do you feel any of that yourself? Frustration?”

“Of course I do. I just have chosen my standards, that’s all, and I don’t give a flying flip whether they fit the spirit of the age or not.”

“I respect that. But don’t be mad at me for being a normal guy.”

“I’m not mad. Why would I be mad?”

“Because I keep pressuring you.”

“Don’t sweat it, Eli. I’m not mad. I love you. And the truth is, you’re not all that skillful at the pressuring part.”

“I love you too, Melinda.”

One more kiss and Eli was on his way. The frustration didn’t fade, but he couldn’t help but think the evening had been a positive one. He’d gotten on well with Melinda’s family and was more sure than ever of Melinda’s devotion to him.

He was driving past one of Tylerville’s three in-town cemeteries when he realized he had not remembered to share Curtis Stokes’s news with Melinda, or even to tell her about the invitation to dine with Coleman Caldwell at his home.

He’d have to call her as soon as he got home.

HE GLANCED OVER INTO the cemetery he was passing, and slowed for a better look.

Over on the far side, a man was placing flowers on a grave. In the lingering early summer light, Eli recognized Donald New, from the Lower Lights Rescue Mission. He remembered the flowers that had been in New’s office and New’s mention that he was going to place them on the graves of his late wife and daughter.

Eli watched briefly, but felt intrusive and didn’t want to be seen spying. He moved on, then realized he wanted to know the names on those graves. The rescue mission leader had declined to reveal what his name had been before he took on his current, symbolic surname of “New,” but his original name could be ascertained from the names of his deceased wife and daughter.

Eli had no intention to publish the names and violate his pledge to Donald New. He just wanted to know.

So rather than driving straight to his apartment, Eli drove through town a few minutes, randomly, to give New time to finish his grave decoration and move on. Eli meandered and admired houses where the lawns and landscaping were well-maintained, and silently chided those where it had been neglected. His father used to do that, out loud, when driving Eli and his mother around Strawberry Plains and Knoxville.

Eli passed Jake Lundy’s house and saw his friend on his porch, rocking and smoking a cigar. Lundy had told him he smoked two cigars a month, an old habit he’d never felt inclined to alter. Two a month was just right for him, giving him a treat to look forward to just like he looked forward to the one apple pie per month his wife baked. “You can enjoy about anything harmlessly as long as you establish a limit and stick to it,” Lundy had said.

Eli circled back around and headed toward the cemetery again. New was no longer at the graves, now festooned with flowers. Eli parked and went across to the graves, glancing around as he went in case New was still around. He did not see him.

He went to the graves New had decorated. He read the names … and was mentally yanked back to the day Melinda had first come to Hodgepodge. He remembered that crude-talking trucker who had later came to a bad end in that highway accident.

The trucker’s name had been Moody, and he had told Eli his mother was buried in Kincheloe County, and that he had a sister named Emmie, of whom he’d lost track.

Eli had just found that track. Trucker J.D. Moody’s sister, Emmie, was buried in one of the graves Donald New had just covered in flowers. EMMIE KATRINA MOODY, March 12, 1952 – October 1978. Beloved daughter and mother.

The grave beside hers was that of LORENE PADGETT MOODY, July 9, 1930 – May 15, 1974. A DEVOTED MOTHER. Emmie’s mother, clearly, and also that of J.D. Moody, truck driver. And she’d been the one-time wife of Donald New, who must have had the surname of Moody in the days before he became, by his own description, “New” in both name and nature.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

“WELL, IT
IS
YOU MR. SCUDDER,” said a voice from behind Eli. Startled, he turned and saw Donald New striding toward him across the cemetery. “I thought it looked like you over here.” New glanced at something lying on top of a nearby tombstone. “Ah, there they are! I got to my car and realized I’d left my keys somewhere while I was putting out those flowers.” He picked up the keys and put them in a pocket.

Eli was embarrassed at having been caught and came clean. “I drove by a little while ago and noticed you here placing the flowers. You’d said back at the mission that you were going to put the flowers on the graves of your wife and daughter, and I admit I was curious as to their names. But not for the story I’m writing. Just so I could know for myself. Purely personal curiosity. Just like I promised, I’ll not publish the names. Mr. Moody.”

New knelt and looked at the graves. “Not Moody now. I’m ‘New’ through and through. I never really appreciated the good things in life back when I was Donnie Moody,” he said. “I was selfish, interested only in my own pleasure and gratification. I was as sinful a man as you could find, without any real understanding of what I was doing to myself, to my own family, to my own soul. Poor Lorene … I was unfaithful to her so many times. Unfaithful even on the very night before I left my family abandoned at a motel. I drove off and never went back. Dear God, how could I have been what I was then?”

Eli had no answer and did not attempt to voice one. He looked at Emmie’s gravestone. “This was your daughter? She died young. Is it all right to ask what happened to her?”

New’s chin was quivering and it was clear he could easily fall completely apart. “So sad,” he said. “So very sad. I wasn’t there to see her in her last days, and I learned the story only after she was gone. I was told most of it by my wife’s sister, who we were going to visit the night I pulled into the Winona Court Inn because of an overheating car, and because I’d seen a sinful opportunity I wanted to take advantage of. That night I fell into my usual pattern of sin and unfaithfulness, this time with a poor exploited girl who was so pathetic, so sad, so misused by the very man to whom it had fallen to raise her … God forgive me. God forgive me and all the others who hurt that poor ragged child. It was my sin of that night, combined with a hundred similar sins of days and nights before that, that destroyed my family. It was Emmie herself who found me out that night, and told Lorene … and being the worm that I was in those days, I reacted by just fleeing and throwing my own family away. And myself.” Emotion surged. “Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry. I just drove away from them, with them standing there. Drove away!”

New was unable to speak for a few minutes, quietly sobbing. At last he drew in some deep and ragged breaths and pulled himself together. “Please,” he said. “Put none of this in the story you are writing. I beg you.”

“Not a word of it. I promise. But it helps me to know it. It gives your story, and the story of the Lower Lights Mission, that much more meaning to me as I try to tell it like it should be told.”

“Thank you.” New straightened and calmed himself further. “You asked about my daughter, Emmie,” he said. “Her story breaks my heart every day of my life. I wasn’t around to see most of it happen, and I suppose I’m mostly grateful for that. What father wants to see his own little girl fall into such a despair that she ends her own life?”

“Oh. Oh no. What … what happened?”

“After I abandoned the family and fell into a petty but steadily worsening criminal life, I ended up in prison for some years, the victim of my own evil ways. Lorene went on and did what she could for the kids … she worked in housekeeping for the college here, and kept the kids fed as they finished their growing up. God bless her for how hard she worked for them.”

“She must have really loved her children,” Eli said.

“She did. But neither she nor I had the character and the ability to raise children as they should be raised. There were no ‘lower lights’ burning in our family to guide them toward the higher light in the harbor. Emmie drifted into a lifestyle that compromised her. Bad choices, made in desperation and loneliness, and from the lack of guidance. I’m told she did like so many young women and involved herself with the wrong kind of men … just as my Lorene had done when she involved herself with me. The old me. I wish she could know me as I am now. I wish.”

Eli found no reply to make. New continued his narrative.

“I don’t think Emmie ever fell into prostitution or drugs, but she did become a, well, performer … of the wrong sort. A dancer in a troupe with other lost young women doing what they thought they had to do to survive. And she ended up with a baby, fathered by a man unwilling to stand by her and become her husband. He made her promises, then left her to care all on her own for the child he’d planted in her. I don’t where that man is now, or even what his name was, and it doesn’t matter, because he was gone from her very quickly. Poor Emmie did her dancing and worked in bars where she had to strut around and show herself off like a thing instead of a God-created human being … just so her little child could be fed. It’s a wicked world out there, Eli, wicked as the pit of hell. And so many young innocents get trapped in it and get their innocence destroyed. It was that way with poor Emmie. My little girl!”

He had to stop and weep a little more, and Eli wondered if he’d done wrong to ask the man to share with him, for the mere sake of his own curiosity, a story so personal and wrenching. Wrong or right, Eli was fascinated and moved by what he was hearing.

“What became of Emmie’s baby?”

“Only God above knows. I never met her child … my own grandchild. All I know is that somehow the little one was taken away from my daughter, how and where, I don’t know, and the loss made Emmie so hopeless that, two weeks later, she went to a motel, alone, and put an end to herself.” More tears from Don New now. “Alone there in a room in the very motel where our family spent its last night together. The last night I spent under the same roof as my family. I don’t know if Emmie chose that particular place because our family had been there, of it it was simply the handiest choice.”

Eli felt he had to say something, even though he could think of nothing but the obvious. “I’m sorry for all you’ve lost, Don.”

“Young man, let me tell you that God forgives sin, and makes wretched old sinners into his own eternal treasures … but even then, even with grace greater than sin, there is still pain that lingers. A man with an amputated leg can sometimes still feel hurting where the leg used to be. It’s like that with the wrongs we do. Even a healed wound can hurt. Even forgiven wrongs still carry a sting sometimes.”