(2005) Wrapped in Rain (16 page)

"It's a long story," I said, "some I'm not even sure of myself, but it's a woman and her child. Her son."

Mose interrupted me. "Tucker, I remember little Katie. Looks like she's grown up a bit."

Mose's memory surprised me. "They're ..." I looked back toward the house. "Running from something. I found them last night in the rainstorm. Their car wasn't going anywhere and I couldn't leave them stranded. Miss Ella's was all I could think of."

"Ohhh." Mose worked the pitchfork through the hay, mucking out the manure and tossing it into the wheelbarrow. "You know as well as I do that if she were here, she'd have done the same. Except she'd be in there now fixing breakfast." I walked over to the stall where Glue was feeding and rubbed his nose. Then I climbed into the loft and threw down a bale of hay. With Glue fed and groomed, I peeked through Miss Ella's window.

"Tuck," Mose whispered, "you be careful peeking in that window. My sister's ghost is liable to lift that thing open and pull you through it."

I laughed. He was right.

At noon, Katie walked onto the back porch, wrapped in a blanket. I was in the barn, saddle-soaping Glue's saddle, stirrups, and reins, when I heard the door shut. I walked outside the barn and noticed for the first time how much she still looked like the memory in my head. Her shoulders, uncovered by the blanket, sloped gracefully, falling like the tender limbs of a weeping willow. The smell of cut grass mixed with stall muckings and dry cedar chips wafted across the back porch. The smell was strong, like Vicks VapoRub, and filled my lungs with each deep breath.

She stepped off the porch and walked toward me, wearing long, baggy jeans and a flannel shirt, neither of which fit very well. Drawing closer, she lifted the blanket and wrapped it tighter around her shoulders.

"Good morning," she half-whispered, squinting and scanning the driveway as if she were looking for something.

I pointed to the coffeepot on the corner of the bench. "I put on a fresh pot about an hour ago. It might help open those eyes." She nodded, her eyes still retreating from the sunlight, and poured a cup. She held it between both hands, blew the steam off the top, and brought it to her lips.

"Coming in last night, I didn't put two and two together and realize we were here until I figured out you were you." She sipped again, avoiding eye contact. "Everything was so ... well, it just took a few minutes for all of this to register with"-she tapped the side of her head-"the memories." I nodded and methodically rubbed the saddle. "I'm surprised you held on to this place," she said.

I looked around. "It's a good thing I did. Otherwise, we're guilty of some pretty serious trespassing."

She smiled and breathed lightly over the top of her coffee, cooling the next sip. She eyed my saddle. "What're you doing?"

"Well, this saddle belongs to that horse." I pointed to Glue's stall, marked by a brass nameplate. "And in a few minutes, I figure the little boy in that house is going to come running out that door. And when he does, he'll see that horse and want to go for a ride. So I thought I'd get it ready."

She nodded and smiled as if the whisper of a memory had interrupted her sip. I broke the silence.

"I had your car towed this morning to John's Garage in Abbeville." I stretched both arms beneath the saddle and carried it across the barn to hang it over Glue's stall. `John is the closest thing you'll find around here to a mechanic who would, or can, work on a Volvo, but I think you're looking at two weeks before he can have it running again." I paused, because I didn't want to hit her with too much bad news at once. "I hope your insurance is good."

"That bad?" she asked.

"That bad."

She nodded again and then walked to the coffeepot. Blowing the heat off the top of her mug, she looked at me out of the corner of her eyes and said, "Thank you."

"Well, Mose actually bought and made the coffee. I just poured some water over the used grounds."

She looked down and shuffled her feet close together. "That's not what I meant."

"Oh, then you mean thanks for not shooting back?"

She shook her head and found my eyes with hers.

I dropped the sarcastic tone. "You're welcome."

She grabbed a brush and began stroking Glue's mane. He took to her quickly, even nudging her with his nose.

During middle school, local coaches and players were starting to notice me due to baseball. People had identified me as a "player" and kept telling my coach, "That boy's got talent," "There's your star player," and "I haven't seen bat speed like that in a long time." I admit it; my head was swelling with the new identity. I also liked it because it was the first time I ever remember doing something right in other people's eyes. And it was an identity separate from "That's Rex Mason's boy."

I came home one afternoon, all full of myself, and Miss Ella yelled at me not to track mud inside the house. I ignored her. Quick as a minute, she reached me, jerked my head around, and said, "Child, you listen to me, and you look me straight in the eyes when I'm talking to you. I may be just old hired help, and a country woman to boot, but I'm a human. And you know what? God thought of me. He actually took the time to dream me up. I may not be much to look at, but what you see first started in the mind of God, so don't stand there and ignore me like I don't exist. You remember that." Miss Ella only had to say that one time to get my attention. And yes, I took my cleats off at the door from then on.

Later that night, while she was putting me to bed, I looked up and she gently poked me in the chest with her cracked and arthritic fingers. "You got something special in here. You may have the greenest eyes and best bat in Little League, but you're more than good looks, home runs, and triples. You got something inside that few else got. God gave you a people place big enough for more than just yourself. You start believing all this stuff other people say and pretty soon you'll only have room for you. Remember, there's an inverse relationship between your head and your heart. If your head swells, your heart shrinks. Tucker, you are not the sum of your bat speed and batting averages. And when you find that thing that you do-maybe it's baseball, and maybe it's not, but whatever it is-don't let it go to your head. You stay down here with the rest of us. I don't care if you find yourself on the front cover of Time magazine; you be Tucker Mason."

"But, Miss Ella, I don't want to be Tucker Mason."

"Well, child," she said with a disbelieving smile and resting her hand on my chest, `just who do you want to be?"

"I want to be Tucker Rain."

Her face softened with an "Ohhh" expression. She pushed sweaty hair out of my eyes and her breath washed across my face. "You can't choose your parents, child. The only thing you can control in this life is what you say and what you do."

The day she died, I assumed the name Tucker Rain.

Katie leaned against the workbench and watched my hands work the leather. "I used to look for your name at the bottom of all the photos of the top-shelf magazines. Then one day"-she turned and looked out across the pasture-"I was walking by the magazine rack and saw the Time cover. I didn't even have to look for your name. I just knew."

Two years ago, Doc sent me to Sierra Leone to cover the diamond trade and resulting rebel war. Two weeks into my stay, I shot a photo of three double-amputees standing shoulder to shoulder, smiling, with silver begging cups hung around their necks. A painful paradox. Healthy as horses, their whole lives before them, and yet they couldn't eat, dress, or go to the bathroom without a helping hand. Six weeks later, Doc called me with tears dripping off his face and using one cigarette to light another, saying, "Tucker ... Tuck ... you got the cover ... Time just gave you the cover."

Katie looked up at me. "Tucker, I think Miss Ella would have been proud of you." She kicked at the dirt and looked into the blackness of her coffee. "I was."

I finished the saddle and then emptied my camera bag, lens by lens, on the bench around me. I hadn't done that in a while and needed to check my lenses. I grabbed a camel-hair brush and started dusting. Katie watched quietly, her mouth nervously chewing on whatever it was she wanted to say. Finally, she got her nerve up. "I owe you some sort of explanation."

"The thought had crossed my mind."

"You want the long or short version?"

"I want the version that doesn't make me an accessory to anything."

She smiled again and nodded. "I suppose I had that coming."

"You did."

"That revolver is in the top of the closet. Unloaded and laying in a shoe box filled with old pictures. Most are of you. I even found one or two of me in there. Anyway, it's up there where Jase can't get his hands on it. Not that he would, but you're welcome to do whatever you want with it. It's pretty obvious that I don't know how to handle it."

For the first time I looked closely at the bags surrounding her eyes. They weren't bags. "You get those black marks from the same guy you stole that revolver from?"

She leaned back, cupped her hands inside the sleeves of her sweatshirt, hiding her fingers, and I had a feeling I was about to hear twenty years of history.

"Dad took us to Atlanta but had a real funny feeling about working with your father, so he quit after only three days. He went to work with some guys who had warned him to steer clear of Rex Mason. Anyway, Dad found his niche and so did I. They enrolled me at a private school with a good music program not far from the house called Pace Academy. The teachers there taught me a lot, but more than anything, they taught me how much Mom really knew. One thing led to another ... Julliard heard me play and awarded me a scholarship. I spent four years in New York going to school, playing the piano, and freezing my tail off from November to March."

Katie had changed; her voice, her figure, her facial expressions-every part of her-had grown and now had mileage, but the sound of Katie making fun of herself told me that she hadn't fallen that far from the tree. Inside that scared woman, I heard a familiar sound.

"To make money, I'd play weekends in basement bars and second-story jazz clubs through Upper and Lower Manhattan. By my senior year, the managers were calling me, and I started playing over candlelight and white tablecloths."

"Meaning the tips were better and fewer people spit beer at you?"

"Exactly. One night, I was digging through my tip jar after the restaurant had closed and I found a thousanddollar bill. A thousand-dollar bill! I thought it was a mistake. I had never seen one. Anyway, I graduated, decided I liked Central Park in the springtime, and started putting money in the bank."

"You really liked New York?" I interrupted, picking up another lens.

She shrugged. "Not at first, but it grew on me. It's not a bad place." She smiled. "It did get a little crazy, and for a country girl from Alabama, a bit too fast-paced. At twenty-five, a jazz restaurant off Fifth Avenue called The Ivory Brass booked me four nights a week. Most of Wall Street filtered through there during the course of a week. I felt like the female version of Billy Joel's Piano Man."

Katie sipped, looked through her coffee, and I could tell her mind was walking down Fifth Avenue. She had come a long way from the little girl who waved through her dad's back window.