Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind (3 page)

I
’
D ABOUT PACED
a rut in my hardwood floors before I was able to reach Sam that afternoon. I knew where he was, of course, but that didn’t make the wait any easier. Sam had retired not long after Wesley Lloyd passed, right when I needed him the most,
to fish!
for the Lord’s sake. He’d turned my routine affairs over to Binkie Enloe, so now I had two lawyers, one a young woman whose ability I’d doubted at first and the other that old man who’d rather fish than eat.

“One more call,” I said to myself, “and if he’s still not home, I’m going over there and sit on his porch till he gets there.”

I looked out the window and saw Deputy Bates with the boy out in the backyard. He was supposed to be conducting an investigation, questioning the child and trying to get some details as to the Puckett woman’s plans. Looked more like they were playing, though, than treating the situation with the seriousness it warranted.

As I stood there watching that unlovely child—I declare, only a mother could love him and, Lord, even she had taken off—I felt a twinge of pity for him before I could stop myself. It got even worse when I saw the child bend over in a fit of crying. Deputy Bates pulled him close and let him cry on his shoulder.
I gripped the side of the sink and bowed my head, overcome with too many feelings that didn’t make sense. Of course, I am tenderhearted when it comes to children.

Even though I intended to parade that child before the town, I was glad for the hemlock hedge around the yard that hid him from curious eyes. I knew I had to get myself together before going public with the pretense that he hadn’t been the shock of my life. I looked out the window again and saw him take off those cockeyed glasses and wipe his eyes with the handkerchief Deputy Bates gave him. The child needed distraction and entertainment or he’d be dripping tears all over Main Street and everywhere else. There wasn’t one thing around my house to play with, though, since Wesley Lloyd and I had never been blessed. Well, obviously, Wesley Lloyd had been. I’d just have to write some checks for swings and play toys so everybody would know how happy I was to have the little visitor.

I turned loose of the sink, sighing, and dialed the phone again.

“Sam!” I said when he finally answered. “Get yourself over here. I need to talk to you.”

“Nice to hear from you, Julia,” Sam Murdoch said in that smiling way of his that I didn’t appreciate much at any time, and certainly not at this one. He’d gotten worse about it since Wesley Lloyd had passed. “What’s got you so stirred up?”

“I’ll tell you when you get here, so put up that fishing rod or whatever you’re piddling with, and get over here. I’ve got more trouble than I can handle.”

“Then it must be a doozy. I’m on my way.”

I sat down on my Duncan Phyfe sofa in the living room to wait for Sam, who in spite of laughing at me half the time was a man I trusted. I used to think he’d been Wesley Lloyd’s closest friend, but I was beginning to think that my husband hadn’t had any close friends. Wesley Lloyd had played everything close to
his chest, an admirable quality in a sharp businessman but likely to cause unexpected heart attacks, as he’d found out to his sorrow.

I’d known Sam Murdoch ever since I’d come to Abbotsville as a bride, and considered him and Mildred my friends. They used to come by on Sunday afternoons and we’d go for a drive together, Sam and Wesley Lloyd in the front seat, and Mildred and me in the back. That was before Mildred went to her reward some years back. The men had talked business and church—they were both elders—and we’d talked housekeeping and church, with a little whispered gossip to spice things up. Wesley Lloyd didn’t approve of gossip.

Sam always ended the drive with a stop at the Dairy Queen for a chocolate-dipped vanilla soft cone. We all got one, except Wesley Lloyd, who had his in a cup with a spoon. Didn’t want to drip on his three-piece suit. He was careful in everything he did, and at the time I took quiet pride in all his neat peculiarities. Like, for instance, he always stirred his iced tea seventeen exact times—I counted—each time with seventeen little tinks on the bottom of the glass.

The thing you had to know about Sam Murdoch, though, was not to trust his rumpled appearance and slow-moving ways. There were stories about him around town, like how he’d tell other attorneys from over in Charlotte or Raleigh, “I’m just a country lawyer up here in a country town,” he’d say. And they’d come to Abbotsville for a court case, all patronizing and sure of themselves, until Sam took them on in open court. They’d leave town not knowing what hit them.

When Sam showed up at my door, his sweat-stained panama in his hands, I knew he’d walked the four blocks from his house. And in August heat, too.

“Get in here and cool off, Sam,” I said, opening the screen
for him. “I declare, it’s foolish to be walking in this heat. It must be ninety degrees out there.”

“Pretty warm, Julia,” he said, coming into the living room. “Reckon Lillian’s got any ice tea around?”

“Yes, and chocolate cake, too, which I don’t suppose you’d refuse. Come on back to the kitchen; I want you to see something out there, anyway.”

He followed me down the hall and out into the kitchen, settling himself at the table where Lillian and I’d had many a cup of coffee together. It struck me how natural it seemed to ask Sam back there, when it had never occurred to me to sit at that table with Wesley Lloyd. Wesley Lloyd had not been a kitchen kind of man. He’d had his meals in the dining room—“A place for everything, Julia,” he used to tell me, “and everything in its place.”

Since Lillian was nowhere around, I glanced out the window and saw her outside with Deputy Bates and that child. So I got Sam his iced tea and a slice of cake. Then I sat down across from him and told him about the heavy burden that had been laid upon me that morning.

He ate and nodded, frowned a few times, and then said, “I’m sorry you had to find out this way, Julia.”

That took the wind out of my sails. Any lingering hope that Wesley Lloyd’s nefarious activities weren’t widely known went with that wind.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said, wavering between screaming my head off and crying myself sick.

“That’s not exactly the kind of story to take to a wife,” he said. The pity I heard in his voice nearly broke me in two. “And besides,” he went on, “I didn’t know it for a fact; I just strongly suspected it. Nobody with any sense would come to you with a story based on rumor.”

“There’re a lot of people in this town without much sense,” I said. “That’s why I’m surprised no one told me, or even hinted at it.”

“People’re afraid of you, Julia,” he said, his eyes beginning to smile again.

“Afraid, my foot. How can anybody be afraid of me?”

“You’re a woman with a strong sense of right and wrong, and you don’t mind telling the difference to anybody who’ll listen.”

“It’s all a sham,” I whispered, digging out my damp handkerchief. “All I’ve ever done was parrot Wesley Lloyd. I’ve never had a thought or opinion of my own, I realize that now. Maybe if I’d had enough sense to think for myself, I’d have found out about him long before this.

“I need to know something, Sam. Why in the world didn’t he provide for that woman and her child in some way before he passed? Didn’t he care about them? How did he think she was going to get along, raising the child by herself? It’s just not like him to be unprepared for a contingency.”

“I tried, Julia,” he said. “I kept after him for years to get his affairs in order. I don’t mean specifically for the woman, although like most everybody I’d heard the stories. But all he had was that standard will that you and he made out, what, twenty years or so ago. Remember that? He came in wanting a will for himself and one for you, each leaving the other everything. Just your basic kind of will until, he told me, he could plan one out in detail.”

I could feel my face turning white and my eyes getting bigger. “Do I remember it? Like it was yesterday! That was right after Papa died and left me twenty-five thousand dollars, my share from the sale of the home place. Sam,” I said, as a hot pain shot through me, “those wills were for his benefit! He wanted to make sure he got everything I had if I went before he did. That’s the
truth, isn’t it? He didn’t count on dying first, did he? And, Lord help me, I didn’t think twice about signing whatever he put in front of me.” The pain in my chest stopped the flow of angry words. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “I know he didn’t intend for it all to come to me. He never trusted me with anything financial, so I don’t understand why he didn’t change his will later on.”

“I don’t understand it either, Julia. When I stopped practicing law, that was one of the things I told Binkie to get on to. See if she’d have more luck in getting old W.L. to update his will.”

“W.L.,” I said with a rueful smile. “He never did appreciate you calling him that.”

“Too uptight for his own good. You know, it’s crossed my mind that one reason he kept putting off making another will was that he’d have to admit to this woman. Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to tell me why he would include her and the child. That’s why I thought Binkie might be able to do it.”

“Binkie’d never have had a chance with Wesley Lloyd,” I said, waving that consideration away. “He wouldn’t’ve confided in anybody who, in his opinion, was untried, much less a woman, no matter how capable. But, Sam, he wouldn’t have had to admit to anything if he’d made some provision for them outside of a will. You know, bought her a house and set up some kind of fund for the child. Why couldn’t he have done that?”

“Julia,” Sam sighed, “I hate to speak ill of the dead, but here’s my opinion. I think W.L. just couldn’t turn it loose. He had to control it all, and that’s a failing of a lot of successful men. But,” he went on, “tell me this. Why’re you so worried about them? You aren’t feeling guilty about it all coming to you, are you? Or feeling sorry for that litte boy out there?”

“Neither one!” I said, pushing back my chair and getting to my feet. “The idea! I’m not feeling guilty about the one nor sorry for the other. No, I’m just mad as thunder, because if he’d
provided for them outside of the will, I’d never have known about them. Since I never knew how much he had in the first place, I wouldn’t’ve missed what he did for them. I tell you, Sam, if he had to get involved with that woman, it seems the least he could’ve done was to’ve kept them out of my life. Now here I am stuck with that illegitimate, illegal, and…and unwanted child out there!”

I
PACED BACK
and forth, wringing my handkerchief until I calmed myself enough to sit back down. Sam put his hand over mine, but I was too exercised to be so easily comforted.

“And here’s another thing, Sam,” I said, intent on learning as much as I could about the man I’d spent forty-some-odd years with. “Do you know anything about him planning to leave anything to the church?”

Sam put both hands on the edge of the table and leaned back in his chair, tipping it off the floor. He smiled and shook his head. “Not from him. Never a word of any intention like that. But I heard plenty about it while I was on the session. Seems W.L. hinted around about it to Larry Ledbetter, and Ledbetter took it to heart. He’s been planning how to spend that windfall for years and, since W.L.’s death, the whole session’s been discussing new building plans. That’s one reason I resigned.”

“You what?” I couldn’t believe I’d heard right. “You can’t resign from the session! You were elected, Sam. How could you resign?”

“Easy,” he said. “I just did it. I thought things would change when the church began to rotate elders, but they haven’t. Bunch
of old coots on there now who haven’t had an idea of their own since nineteen-fifty. I got tired of fightin’ ’em.”

“Well,” I said, not quite able to take it in. I’d never heard of anybody resigning from the session except for a terminal disease or a move out of town. “Well,” I said again, “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at anything you do, Sam Murdoch.”

I got up and walked to the window, maybe hoping my problem out there had disappeared. But there he was, sitting on a garden bench with his head down and that grocery sack hugged to his chest. Deputy Bates was leaning over, his elbows on his knees, talking to him. I watched as the boy shook his head, then a bit later nodded at something Deputy Bates said. The child hadn’t been raised right, which didn’t come as any surprise.

“What am I going to do, Sam?” I turned away from the window as I realized how much I wanted Sam to approve any course of action I took.

“I take it you’re planning to keep the boy?”

“I don’t have much choice, though Deputy Bates is going to do everything he can to find that woman.” I fumbled for my handkerchief as the injustice of it all flew through me again. “I ought to sue her! And I just may do it, if he ever finds her.”

“Careful with that kind of talk, Julia,” Sam said, very carefully himself. “The last session meeting I attended, there was some discussion of suing you.”

“Me! What on earth for?”

“Money. Some on the session, a good many, in fact, think there’s a better than even chance of laying claim to some of W.L.’s estate, based on what Larry Ledbetter calls verbal commitments to him. He seems to think that a promise made to a member of the clergy ought to carry more weight than a twenty-year-old will.” Sam paused, studied his empty plate, then looked me straight in the eye. “I’ll tell you this, Julia, when a preacher and his session decide the Lord needs a new building, there’s very
little that can stop them. Except how to pay for it, and that’s where they figure you come in. So I want you to watch yourself. Don’t imply anything, don’t promise anything, and, above all, don’t sign anything.”

Well, that really took my breath away, but at the same time a reassuring thought entered my mind. “That’s why you resigned, Sam, isn’t it?”

“Since I’m the executor of the will, I couldn’t very well be party to an effort to have it set aside. I won’t deny that money’s important, but the idea of a church suing one of its own members to get it is more than I can stomach. Especially if that member is a helpless widow woman.” He grinned until I had to smile back.

“Huh,” I snorted, “I’ll show them a helpless widow woman, and I’ll show them a few Scripture verses, too. ‘Ye shall not afflict any widow or fatherless child,’ Exodus twenty-two, twenty-two, and that’s just one. So with you and Binkie Enloe on my side, to say nothing of the Lord, I’m surprised they’d even consider such a thing.”

“Oh, they’ll try to get some big firm out of Raleigh or Atlanta, but they won’t have any luck. The only way they could overturn that will is to come up with a later one.”

“They’re a bunch of fools,” I pronounced, “and I can’t worry about them now. I’ve got too much else on my mind.”

“I know you have, Julia, and I’m sorry for it. I don’t want to add to your worries, but it does surprise me a little that this Puckett woman hasn’t thought of suing. She’d have a better chance than the church at a share of the estate. If she can document what she claims.”

“She told me she’d talked to Binkie, so maybe she has thought of it.”

“Well, you’d better talk to Binkie, too, and let her know what’s going on. For all we know, she’s not left town to study
nails but to consult an attorney. Leaving the boy with you might be her way of getting on your soft side, make you recognize him or feel sorry for him. In case the suit doesn’t turn out so well for her.”

“That’s the most foolish thing I ever heard,” I said. “How in the world could anybody think I’d give a flip for a child like that? That’s beyond my comprehension. No. No danger of that, but, Sam, this whole situation’s a pure tribulation to me. Tell me what I ought to do.”

“Seems to me you’ve already thought it out pretty well. Let’s hope Coleman can find his mother, and she can make better arrangements. If she can’t”—he shrugged his shoulders—“well, you’re doing the only decent thing you can do. I hate to see any child get put into the system. But, Julia, be careful, people don’t like too much flaunting. You may not care what they say about W.L., or you, but they could hurt that little boy out there.”

“Just let them try,” I said, wringing my handkerchief until it was stretched out on the bias. “If I take that child under my wing, they’ll have to deal with me first!”

“Well,
I
sure wouldn’t want to tangle with you,” Sam said. Then, rising from his chair, he added, “Unless it was on my terms.”

I
NEVER SPENT
such a miserable night as I did the first night that child was in my house. I was so edgy and shaky that I couldn’t bring myself to do anything for him.

“Lillian,” I said, “would you please stay a little longer and get that child to bed for me? I just don’t think I can touch him or anything that belongs to him.”

“You better get over that,” she told me. “If you gonna do like you said and put on a good show, you got to make out like you glad to have him. And that means takin’ care of that baby.”

“I know it. I know it. You don’t have to tell me. I declare,
my mind is so jumbled, all I can think of is how bad that child needs a haircut. Now, with all I have to worry about, you’d think something besides a shaggy head of hair would be weighing on my mind.” Appearances are important, I’ve always thought, but to tell the truth, it was
my
appearance with that child in tow that was bothering me.

“Huh,” she said, heading back to the kitchen, where the boy was waiting. “Jus’ get him one, and that be it. Another worry’ll pop up to take its place.”

There were plenty of worries waiting in line, I thought, as I heard the two of them go up the stairs. Lillian put fresh sheets on the bed in the room across the hall from mine, tucked the child in along with his paper sack, and, before leaving for her own house, told me to go to bed and quit worrying.

Easy to say, for it was the worst night of my life, and I’m including the night I found Wesley Lloyd draped over his steering wheel, his eyes and mouth wide open as if he’d had the surprise of his life.

I’d been sleeping the sleep of the just when I heard his car pull in the driveway about midnight, no different from any other Thursday night for ten years or more. Wesley Lloyd believed in routine, and his never changed from sunup to sundown. Except on Thursdays, when I thought he worked late to prepare for the Friday morning meetings in the boardroom of the Springer Bank and Trust. I’d turned over and waited to hear the car door slam, the jingle of his keys, and his heels clicking on the cement walk. But I’d heard nothing.

After some little while of lying there wondering what was keeping him, I’d put on a robe and gone downstairs to see about him. I tell you, when Wesley Lloyd’s routine changed, it had to be for a good reason. And it was, because he was dead as a doornail. Right in our driveway. In his new Buick Park Avenue. Steel gray with…but I’ve already told that.

It was awful and I never wanted to go through another experience like it. I didn’t intend to, either, since I didn’t plan to marry or bury another husband. Well, the burying part hadn’t been so hard, what with the way this town and my church comfort the bereaved. They came with piles of food and flowers and donations to my favorite charity, and somebody sat with me every minute of the day ready to fulfill my every wish. I felt like the star of Wesley Lloyd’s funeral. Queen for a day or two, until they figured it was time for me to manage on my own. And I’d done that with Lillian’s help, and Binkie’s. Sam’s, too. In fact, it’d been so easy that I didn’t know why in the world a widow woman would ever remarry. You might find out what kind of man you were yoked to after it was too late to do anything about it, like I had.

Not that I’d’ve known what to do if I’d known what Wesley Lloyd was up to before he passed on. But all through that long night as I stared in the dark on my lonely bed, thinking about that child across the hall, I kept telling myself I’d have done
something
.

BUT YOU HAVE
to know about something before you can do anything about it. And I didn’t know a blessed thing until the results of it showed up on my doorstep. Blindest woman in North Carolina. Believed everything anybody’d ever told me, especially if it was a man doing the telling. That’s the way I was raised, Southern and Presbyterian. But no, I take that back. I only believed it was gospel truth if it came from Larry T. Ledbetter, my preacher, or Sam Murdoch, my lawyer, or Wesley Lloyd Springer, the man I’d been married to for forty-four years.

I’d been proud of that. Proud that I was married to a man of means and position, one of the few men left in the state who owned his own bank, and solid as a rock, too. Both him and the
bank. People trusted him with their money and, I gave him credit, their money was always safe in the Springer Bank and Trust.

We had a good marriage. I thought. He’d found me at my papa’s home down in South Carolina, when he was looking at some new ways of running the bank his daddy had left him. Wesley Lloyd was a progressive thinker even then. He was a churchgoer, too, and that’s where I met him—after Sunday services at my home church. He was always in church whenever Sunday rolled around, didn’t matter where he was or what he was doing. “Sunday’s the Lord’s day, Julia,” he told me. “And the Lord’s house is where we ought to be on it.” So there he was, shaking hands with the preacher, and then with me, as soon as the benediction and the seven-fold amen was over that Sunday so many years ago.

I was the oldest girl in the family, the last one left. My two sisters had already married, and everybody figured I’d be a spinster the rest of my life. Twenty-three years old, unmarried, and no prospects. Sounds pitiful today, doesn’t it? Why in the world I didn’t think of going out on my own and making a life for myself, I don’t know. But that was another small town, choked to the gills with the traditions of the past. I’d gone a while to the teacher’s college at Winthrop, but when Papa needed help at home, guess who was picked? When Papa said, “Jump,” I was always the first one in the air. I knew he’d have preferred one of my sisters—have you ever noticed how the one who wants to please never does?—but he was stuck with me. Until Wesley Lloyd Springer showed up.

Sounds like a love story, doesn’t it? Well, it wasn’t much of one, but I was grateful for it. Wesley Lloyd never was one for romance and sentiment and all the things you read about. He was a businessman, knew what he wanted and how to get it. That’s the way he proposed to me. Everybody thought it was a
whirlwind romance because it all came about so fast. But Wesley Lloyd, being some years older than me, always had his head on his shoulders.

“I need a wife of a certain character and background,” he’d said to me. We were sitting in the front parlor of Papa’s house, and I was studying the half-carat solitaire in its blue velvet box that he’d handed to me. “I have a position to maintain,” he went on as he pulled his gold watch from his vest and glanced at it. That was a habit that never left him. Time is money, he always said. “And I need a wife who’ll keep my house and be a helpmate in my town. I’m not what some would call wealthy, but you’ll never want for anything.”

I took the ring out of the box and turned it round and round. Then I tried it on, and the fact that it fit seemed a sign to me. I was always on the lookout for signs so I’d know the right things to do. I accepted Wesley Lloyd’s proposal without any of the bells and music I’d heard at the picture show on Saturday afternoons. And I didn’t miss it. My sisters had married with stars in their eyes, and after only a few years their eyes had dimmed with the despair of niggling over every penny. I prided myself on making my choice based on sensible grounds and figured, on the basis of our mutual levelheadedness, that Wesley Lloyd and I made a good match. I wanted my own household with a man who could afford it, and I got exactly that.

He brought me to this house forty-four years ago, and I guess I’ll live here till I die. But I’ll be blamed if I’ll die hanging over the steering wheel of a Buick Park Avenue. The house was new then. Brick, two stories with a front veranda that provided an unhampered view of all the comings and goings at the First Presbyterian Church. Only a couple of blocks from Main Street, so I’ve been situated in the middle of everything. Wesley Lloyd said he built the house for his bride, and I remember being so pleased and proud. It took a while for me to realize he’d built it before
he ever met me. But that was Wesley Lloyd for you, always thinking ahead, always prepared. I thought.