The Maid's Version (14 page)

On this, the day of her death, Ruby DeGeer came to recognize her true feelings and feel compromised by the truth they revealed—she still loved the bigwig sonofabitch, she must, since forgiveness is one of the signs, right? Forgiveness felt so icky, slimed at its core, but she’d achieved some perspective without intending to do so and unhappily conceded that there hadn’t truly been much point in Arthur courting utter ruin, though what he did that day Buster died and how would always stink of base treachery and mar him in her mind, but … she woke that Saturday at the farmhouse of Captain Reg Gower, late of the U.S. Army, who’d resigned his commission at Fort Dix upon the death of his widower father and come home to tend the family spread of seven hundred acres out along Lost Spaniard Creek. She made him breakfast, one arm in a cast, one whipping eggs in a skillet, and as he ate she saw Arthur with his sleepy way of looking at her from a soiled bed, that tip of tongue, and wished so that he was the man now swallowing her biscuits. The thought made her feel weak, weak, weak without honor, yes, and though this weakness might well be a treason sprung by her heart, it felt too honest as love to argue with much. She’d never had feelings strong enough to override momentary whims or avarice before, or known a man she wasn’t willing to drop from her life casually or cruelly at a moment of her own choosing and laugh or sing as she sallied away.

Captain Gower said, “One heck of a spread you set, kiddo—great biscuits. Your mama sure showed you how to do.”

The house was large, plain and tidy, with big windows to let in light, and the bottomland just below was dark and excellent growing dirt, with plenty of decent pasture up the slope and around the ridge.

“My mother didn’t have a nose.”

“She what?”

“Only half a nose—more coffee?”

“How’d that happen?”

“Just living. Something you don’t see got her.”

“Maybe one more cup.”

Alma was fond of many country sayings and she said a favorite here: “A wolf will always look to the woods, no matter what you feed it.”

Freddy Poltz stood in the garage under the Arbor, washing automobile parts in a bucket of gasoline, rubbing them dry with rags he tossed when sopped into an old washtub in the corner. He worked alone on Saturdays, and three vehicles were parked in the bay for him to diagnose and repair and slap back together. The old and wide dairy barn doors were open and the day was sunny and he saw two long shadows growing tighter on the floor as they drew near. Two men wearing brim hats and sagged expressions. The smaller man said, “Did you kill my brother?”

“Is he dead?”

“He ain’t been home for supper in seven months.”

“That’s not the same thing as bein’ dead.”

(Sheriff Adderly testified at the first and only Citizens’ Commission Inquiry that he’d been visited on that morning by a St. Louis–acting man, if you catch my drift, who asked about the unidentified body that had been found at Saunders Camp the previous November. Shot located the only evidence, a hat, in the storage closet, and handed it over for inspection. There was bloodied muck dried at the crown and on the brim. The man slowly looked inside, read the label, raised the hat to his nose and inhaled several times without speaking. He held the hat at his face with his eyes closed quite a while before handing it back. He stood from his chair and said, “No, that ain’t Mikey’s.”)

“It probably is.”

“Why are you askin’ me, anyhow?”

“I got myself locked up in the county until four days back, Plug, or I woulda been in the boondocks here askin’ you sooner, when your memory mighta been better. This here, see, is the last place anybody knows Mikey was, and he mentioned to another guy who ain’t personally dead yet that he seen you here in this piss-hole, big as life.”

“What do you want?”

“That bank up there. I went broke sittin’ in the can, Plug—you know how that song goes. So we’re here on a scout and plan on bustin’ that thing open tomorrow night. We came here with enough juice to blow that box—they got a thick one—and maybe four more joints this trip round the sticks, and we’re parkin’ our car out of sight in here so nobody starts wonderin’ about it.”

“There’s a dance upstairs tonight.”

“I didn’t ask to park upstairs.”

“The place’ll be jam-packed and jumpin’.”

“Clear us a goddam space, Plug. And play nice—you got a wife called Mae and two midgets, don’t you? I heard you did.”

Alma put another country saying here: “Times there ain’t nothin’ for it, but a body must hie to the toothache tree and scrape hisself a cure.”

There was on that day a garden luncheon down Curry Street at the home of Judge Swann. Tables were arranged on the grass beneath the shade trees, with festive tablecloths and complete place settings and a menu of cold potato soup, spring lamb with mint jelly, early greens, pickled corn, creamed English peas and black walnut pie. Alma and Kate Daiches were present as wait staff and kept the courses coming. At the rear of the yard (a yard two witnesses would that night later spot Arthur Glencross running across with a panicked look) a small stage of rough planks and two-by-fours had been hammered together, with canvas spread on the flooring and a bedsheet suspended as a curtain on a rope tied between two bent trees. Once the dessert was served, the younger children of those couples assembled there—Swann, Glencross, Etchieson, Haas, Barry, Josselin, Powell, Dacre, Heenan—appeared from behind the curtain to unleash a backyard theatrical, a common feature at gatherings of these families.

Glencross groaned at his table, not in the mood, wearing white linen, not eating, obviously out of sorts. The sight of his own children performing failed to buoy him and he was impatient for the show now started to come to an end. The theatrical was a patched-together mélange of novelty songs presented by a coed group of elementary school hoboes sitting around a campfire made of crumpled red wrapping paper. They had blacking on their cheeks and chins to suggest whiskers and dressed in raffish rags and sashes and held sticks onto which plumped kerchiefs were tied. It was expected that the children would guilelessly deliver songs that were sassy or saucy and containing multiple meanings they didn’t suspect and sang of with unknowing purity, and these sly ditties always earned the largest eruptions of laughter and subsequent applause. The hoboes opened the show with “The Men Will Wear Kimonos By and By.”

Glencross excused himself to go indoors, where he found the den unoccupied and helped himself to a tumbler of the Judge’s bourbon whisky, not his preferred libation—too sweet—but he drank it down in one long movement. He was pouring another of equal measure when he saw Alma pass in the hallway. He called her to him: “Where is she?”

“Couldn’t say.”

“You’ve got to tell me. Tell me now.”

“I imagine she’s with her new fella.”

“Does she already love him, you think?”

“I’d say so—they spent two days last week layin’ out there in the country thinkin’ up baby names. He likes Lloyd or Mabel, but she…”

He rushed through the hall, out the front door and onto the sidewalk, found his Phaeton at the curb, and drove furiously away toward Lost Spaniard Creek. Several people who knew him saw Glencross speed past without so much as looking to the sides in traffic or pausing at crossroads, just held his eyes straight ahead and kept speeding. Three miles short of the Gower spread, Glencross ran over a farm dog that gave chase, the impact and squealing shaking him alert as he clipped a fence pole and found the ditch where two tires burst. He staggered out from behind the wheel and leaned against the rear fender. The dog wasn’t dead yet. The dog he’d run over had mashed hindquarters and wasn’t dead yet or quieted, and Glencross began to weep, sob, shudder. The nearest farmer came from his house still energetically chewing something, with a shotgun in hand, approached the dog, did the loud and merciful thing, then negotiated a fat fee of seven dollars to drive this dapper crybaby—it’s only a dog, mister—back to town and leave him off near the bank.

About then the Dunahew boys were in the yard outside their shack, James experimentally smoking a green stogie-stub he’d found in the gutter, Sidney and John Paul envisioning the trees as castles and climbing high onto the parapets to claim this palace and all its lands for the one and true king, whoever he was. The bark had been worn from the limbs by scrambling kids at play, skinned to whitened lengths that shined and were slick to climb across, adding more danger to the amusement—kids fell, kids sniffled, kids moaned on the dirt, then stood, shook their heads, and climbed whichever tree again.

Alma returned from the luncheon carrying treats for her boys, and they feasted on wedges of black walnut pie presented to them with only a bite or two already gone, and shared a large bowl of creamed English peas. Tummies pretty full, grins alive, all was well. When Ruby dropped by later that afternoon, the women went indoors to talk and stood beside the tilted sink. Ruby said to her sister what she felt she must, she had to be honest though she knew there’d be hurt piggybacking on this honesty, but what she felt was real, sister, real, and rose up from deeper inside than she ever knew she went, and she spoke her heart aloud.

Alma responded, “No, you won’t, either.”

“But it’s what I feel.”

“If you do, you best start lookin’ for a new sister, ’cause you won’t have one here no more.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Do I seem like I don’t?”

Toward dusk the crowd began to gather at the Arbor Dance Hall, as couples and foursomes and lonesome hopefuls walked down from the Stockman’s Café or the Two-Way on the square, drove in from the countryside or strolled over from homes nearby. The street was soon lined with cars parked faced in both directions, and new arrivals pulled onto the grass across the street. The manager of the Alhambra Hotel was firm that no cars could park blocking his entrance or in his small lot and stood on the veranda, arms crossed, watching. Preacher Willard, with his flock in tow, sat on a fence rail down the street and waited for his usual audience of blasphemers and swaggering pagans and trollops with painted faces to assemble in sufficient number.

Arthur Glencross snuck along early with a wavering roll to his steps, and on the advice of the booze within entered Freddy’s garage and found himself a hiding spot. He needed to sit and soon but not where he could be seen. There was an interior stairway to the dance hall and the door upstairs was kept locked from this side, but he sat on the top step in perfect shadow and listened as folks entered and shuffled their feet on the squeaky floor and the band warmed up their instruments. He soon fell asleep with his head thrown backwards against the locked door and his legs stretched two steps down.

He woke in darkness to the sounds of jumped-up music, the flying feet, the bubbly roar of communal fun. The carefree music accompanying belonged to those who could be happy on this night, and he was not among that crowd—no way to be happy, maybe never would be again, as heartbreak can take hold and last far longer than mere scars and he sensed that to be true without quite knowing it from experience yet. He listened with his ear to the door for her voice, didn’t hear it, her laughter, no, someone shouting her name, huh-uh, pondered the pleasing possibility that she might not have attended the dance after all, but decided to … then, there it was in the sudden ebb of sound between songs, her voice, her voice and her smell, he was certain he smelled her as well as heard her say, “Oh, no, I don’t, Captain, but it’s pretty decent of you to say so.” He pulled the Teacher’s bottle from a stretched and misshapen coat pocket, raised the rump and chugged some cure for what presently ailed him and might lame him now and forever, and … he must put a stop to this humiliation of his own making, these discordant feelings squabbling inside his chest while his thoughts turned now to meanly belittling himself for those damned effeminate responses—the schoolgirl weeping, sobs in front of a dirt farmer, for God’s sake, while the generalized joy upstairs was insufferable, and demeaning to his person that so much pleasure came to so many nincompoops on this night when he would know none at all, and he was the one who counted, goddam … If they smelled smoke the pleasure would stop, the music would stop, they’d abandon the dance floor and chase down the outside steps coughing into the street, where Preacher Willard would blister them with his Old Testament tongue, and they might maybe blame the preacher, too. He could pull a prank like that, and when the smoke was more or less cleared they’d return upstairs but it wouldn’t be the same, not after a sudden dose of fear had run in their veins and trembled their hearts.

He needed rags. Or straw. Rags or straw or a piece of tire and some newspaper pages. He stepped down into nearly complete darkness, only one small light shined above the opened doors, and began to feel around on the garage floor, walked over the stains from leaks and spills, into the corners, and found a scrap of cardboard, a grocery sack wadded, and a washtub with rags inside. He built his fire on the second step from the top, sack underneath, cardboard on sack, then rags to make ugly black air that would be sucked through the gap at the bottom of the door and stream plumes of black stink in among all the twirling Jacks-and-Jills with their puny joy, and he held a match to the sack, hustled toward the outside door. He turned to watch the fire make black smoke, and it might’ve made some, he couldn’t tell, but those rags popped with flames in only seconds.