Authors: Bette Lee Crosby
Strangely enough, sitting there and talking openly as she was, Olivia
started to feel a bit lighter—not quite as floaty as she’d felt from Canasta’s
okra soup, but close. “Is there some sort of secret ingredient in this
casserole?” she asked.
“Heavy cream,” Clara answered and shoveled a forkful into her mouth.
When Clara left what she now considered Olivia’s apartment, she went
directly to Maggie Cooper’s and told Maggie they’d been all wrong about Olivia.
“Why, the woman is
devastated!
” she said. “We owe it to poor Charlie to
take care of his wife!”
Next Clara rapped on Henry Myerson’s door and gave him the same
message. She then stopped off at Barbara Jean Conklin’s, Fred Magenheimer’s,
Tillie Rae’s, and Susan Latimer’s, setting everyone straight as to what they
should and shouldn’t do about the widow Olivia Doyle.
Before noon of the next day, Olivia had received eight condolence
calls, six casseroles, three fruit baskets, and a spray of red gladiolas so
large the delivery man had to turn sideways to squeeze through the apartment
door. She’d also been invited to a Fuller Brush party, a gin-rummy luncheon and
Friday night Bingo. When Olivia suggested she was not yet up to socializing,
Gertrude Plumber turned a deaf ear and rambled on about how the group
desperately
needed someone to co-host the monthly pot luck dinner. “We can’t possibly ask
Louise to do it again,” she told Olivia, “…so, you’ve simply
got
to say
yes.”
Although nothing could replace the sweetness of Charlie’s kisses, the
sudden onslaught of friends and neighbors helped to brighten Olivia’s days. Her
skin gradually regained its color and the redness left her eyes. Every once in
a while, mostly when she was with Clara who soon became her closest friend,
Olivia would feel a strange tugging at the corners of her mouth and before
there was time to wonder what was happening, she’d find her face crinkled into
a smile.
Ethan Allen Doyle
Daddy never even thought twice about punching people—but then he was
mean enough to shoot the eye out of a bird for singing the wrong song. I ain’t
one bit like my Daddy. He used to say I got Mama’s foul mouth and sneaky ways,
but Mama said what I got was her love of living. I liked when she said that.
Me and Mama both knew Daddy would throw a shit-fit about us going to
New York; but seeing as how she could unruffle his feathers anytime she’d a
mind to, I figured she’d smooth things over when we got back home. I sure as
hell never figured the fighting to get bad as it did.
Daddy should’ve just let Mama have her fling, then she’d of been done
with it and we’d of come home—‘course I was wishing we’d see a real live Yankee
game before we did. Now, that Yankee game’s gone to hell, along with everything
else.
Truth and Consequence
I
t
was one thing
to hate your daddy so much that you sometimes wished him dead, but quite
another to see his head split open like a rotted pumpkin. Ethan Allen huddled
beneath the wisteria, afraid to move, trying with all his might to twist his
brain around to believing that any minute Susanna and Benjamin would get up and
stumble to the bedroom together. There had been plenty of fights before and
nobody ever ended up dead—but then Scooter Cobb, a mountain of a man with fists
the size of ham hocks, had never before gotten involved. Much as Ethan wanted
to go see about his mama, he couldn’t force himself to leave his hiding place.
When he tried to stand his knees buckled under; when he tried to crawl his arms
stayed locked in place, and if he even thought about crying out for help his
heart took to jumping around as if it would explode. There was no telling what
would happen if Scooter came back.
He might have stayed hidden
forever, but as a splinter of light edged its way into the sky, three black
crows zoomed down from nowhere and began picking at Benjamin. Suddenly Ethan
Allen was no longer held prisoner by the thought of Scooter’s return, he let go
of Dog and bolted from beneath the bush hollering at the top of his voice and
flapping his arms about wildly. He’d figured Benjamin to be in pretty rough
shape, probably feeling meaner than he’d ever before felt, but when the boy saw
his daddy’s faceless body sprawled across the yard, a sickness slithered from
his stomach into his throat. A spew of thick yellow bile suddenly erupted from
his mouth, it was more bitter than anything he had ever tasted. He wanted to
scream and cry out for his mama to come, but there was no sound inside of him,
just the mean yellow bitterness rising time and again.
Once, years ago, he’d come
across the bloody carcass of an animal torn apart by something bigger and
stronger—a lone rat was chewing the last bit of gristle from what had once been
a leg. For weeks on end the sight of such a thing haunted his dreams; sometimes
the animal appeared as a fox, sometimes a dog, sometimes even a newborn calf
skinned to the bone—but no matter what form it took, the cry was always the
same. It was a sound so pitiful it woke him from his sleep night after night.
All that summer he heard it; when the wind blew he heard it, when the night was
still he heard it, right now he heard it louder than ever before. Ethan clapped
his hands over his ears, then finally let go of the call for his mama. He
wasn’t a boy given to fear, but yet he stood frozen in the spot, screaming for
Susanna. “Mama,” he cried over and over again then when no one came, he turned
and stumbled toward the house.
She was still lying on the
bed. “Wake up, Mama,” he shouted, grabbing onto her arm. Susanna’s skin, skin
that always seemed silky soft, was cold to his touch; her arm incredibly heavy,
with the weight of a crowbar attached to it. He held onto her for a moment then
tried to pull his hand back, but he couldn’t, his fingers simply refused to let
go. One by one he had to pry them loose. Once he had released his hold on her,
Susanna’s arm dropped to the side of the bed.
Ethan Allen had seen dead
things before; not people, but calves, chickens and, worst of all, the mare
that died giving birth to a foal. He knew when a living thing stopped breathing
that was the end of it; you either buried it in the ground or carved it up for
eating. Although he could see Susanna had the same blank-eyed stare as the mare
he raised his fist and brought it down hard against her chest, “God-dammit, Mama,”
he shouted, “Wake up!” He pounded his fist against her chest again and again until
his arm ached and his hand swelled to the size of one that had been bee-stung.
“Wake up,” he screamed, “Wake up, God damn you, wake up!”
Susanna never moved. “Son-of-a-bitch!”
Ethan finally screamed and started kicking at the sideboard of the bed, then
the dresser, after that the chifferobe. He whacked a table lamp to the floor
then heaved the wedding photo of Susanna and Benjamin across the room with such
force that it gouged a chunk of plaster from the far wall. “Lousy,
son-of-a-bitch, bastard!” he screamed as loud as he could; then he connected a
string of obscenities and shouted them over and over again. It was the way he
always came back at the unfairness of life—he cussed and screamed until he
couldn’t cuss or scream anymore, until the words grew dry and bitter-tasting in
his throat.
It’s said that a single tear
falls with more weight than a boulder, so when Ethan Allen lowered his head to
Susanna’s bosom and sobbed “Why, Mama, why?” it was possible that a passerby at
the far edge of the field might have heard the boy’s heart crack open. He
stayed there for a long time and cried tears enough to soak her halter through,
but nothing changed. Nothing ever changed. Life was what it was—shit, lousy,
awful. When he finally gave up on crying the sun was high in the sky. “Son-of-a-bitch,”
he said; the crack in his heart pushed itself shut and his face once again took
on that rock hard look of resignation. He picked up the lamp, set it back on
the nightstand, then stumbled to the telephone and asked the operator to ring
up the Sheriff.
“Does your mama know you’re
bothering the Sheriff?” Carolyn Stiles, one of the switchboard operators who
knew Susanna from the diner asked.
“My mama’s dead.”
“Don’t you go smart-mouthing
me, Ethan Allen.”
“I ain’t,” he answered, his
voice black and heavy as an iron skillet. “It’s the truth, Mama got
killed.”
Given the sorrowful sound of
his words, Carolyn quickly realized this was not another of Ethan Allen’s
pranks. “Lord God Almighty!” she gasped, “What happened? Where’s your daddy? Is
he there with you?”
“Daddy’s dead too,” Ethan
mumbled through another choke of words.
“Your mama and daddy’s both
dead?” she gasped. “What happened honey? Are you okay? You hurt?”
Ethan didn’t answer any of
her questions, he just stood there holding the telephone to his ear and
listening as Carolyn called out for someone to have the Sheriff’s office send a
man out to the Doyle place on the double cause there’d been some kind of
tragedy.
“What happened to your mama
and daddy, honey? You can tell
me
,” Carolyn said. “Was it an accident? A
burglar? I got a deputy on his way, but sweetie, you can go right ahead and
tell
me
what happened.”
When grown-ups started
asking questions in such a way, Ethan Allen knew from experience, they were
after something he’d be better off claiming to know nothing about. “I got no
idea,” he finally answered, “…it must’ve happened while I was asleep.”
“Asleep? This late in the
day?”
“I might’ve been up a while,
but…”
“Well, how exactly did your
mama and daddy die?”
“I don’t know. They was dead
when I found them.”
“Where’d you find them?”
“Right where they died.” It
went on like that, question after question, meaningless answer after
meaningless answer until he heard the police car screeching to a stop in the
front yard. Ethan Allen hung up the telephone then watched from behind the
screen door as two policemen climbed from the car. Jack Mahoney, the short light-haired
detective, he’d seen at the diner. But the other one, the one wearing a blue
uniform with a silver badge shined up brighter than an automobile headlight,
the one nearly the size of Scooter Cobb, he was someone Ethan Allen had never
before seen; not at the diner and not around town.
“Boy,” the big one called
out, “you know what happened here?”
“No sir,” Ethan answered,
stepping outside the door. “I must’ve been sleeping.” He’d swallowed down the
last word because he’d looked up and read the policeman’s badge.
Samuel
Cobb.
Scooter’s boy—the policeman his mother said would claim he was
telling lies on people and quick as a wink toss him into reform school for a
thousand years. “I sleep real sound,” Ethan added, “Mama used to say a shotgun
blast couldn’t wake me!”
“Is that so?” Cobb answered.
“I suppose then you didn’t hear a bit of whatever scuffle took place in this
here yard?”
“No sir. Not me. Not last
night. I was sound asleep ‘fore my head hit the pillow.”
Officer Cobb took note of
how the boy kept his eyes to the ground and shifted his weight from one foot to
the other. “Asleep, huh?”
Ethan Allen nodded.
“A fight such as this, and
you didn’t hear nothing? No hollering? No breaking glass?” Cobb gave a dubious
frown.
Susanna always claimed she
knew when a boy was lying and now Ethan Allen began to worry Scooter’s son was
gifted with the same ability. The boy nervously shook his head side to side,
his eyes turned away. He was afraid to look up. One wrong move and Cobb might
see straight through to where the truth was hidden. Ethan felt something
dreadful wriggling along his back, it was probably what his mama always said
would happen—a lying snake had come to call on its kin.
“Seems when that window
broke you would’ve heard it,” Cobb said.
“I done told you, I didn’t
hear nothing.” Ethan was suddenly starting to feel sicker than ever—Cobb knew
he was lying, he was certain of it.
“You sure you’re telling me
the truth?”
“Me? Yes sir.” Ethan wiped a
line of sweat from his forehead.
“Good. Because if I thought
you was lying, I’d have to arrest you. Not telling what you know is concealing
evidence.”
“I ain’t lying! You keep
asking me all these questions but I done told you, I don’t know nothing. I was
asleep. I swear.”
“Oh, really? And, exactly
what time did you go to bed?”
“Before dark. Seven,
seven-thirty, maybe.”
Mahoney, who up until that
moment had been busy securing the ground area around Benjamin’s body and
calling for a unit of crime scene investigation detectives to be sent out,
said, “Ain’t that a bit early? Most nights you’re hanging around the diner till
ten or eleven.”
“Yeah, but my mama wasn’t
working last night.”