A Spool of Blue Thread (32 page)

“You mean you and Mr. Whitshank?”

“Just like Romeo and Juliet,” Mrs. Whitshank said. She laughed, but then she sobered and said, “Now, here is something you might not know. Guess how old Juliet was when she fell in love with Romeo.”

“Thirteen,” Abby said promptly.

“Oh.”

“They taught us that in school.”

“They taught Merrick that, too, in tenth grade,” Mrs. Whitshank said. “She came home and told me. She said, ‘Isn’t that ridiculous?’ She said that after she heard that, she couldn’t take Shakespeare seriously.”

“Well, I don’t know why not,” Abby said. “A person can fall in love at thirteen.”

“Yes! A person can! Like me.”

“You?”

“I was thirteen when I fell in love with Junior,” Mrs. Whitshank said. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

“Oh, goodness, and here you are now, married to him!” Abby said. “That’s amazing! How old was Mr. Whitshank?”

“Twenty-six.”

Abby took a moment to absorb this. “He was twenty-six when you were thirteen?”

“Twenty-six years old,” Mrs. Whitshank said.

Abby said, “Oh.”

“Isn’t that something?”

“Yes, it is,” Abby said.

“He was this real good-looking guy, a little bit wild, worked at the lumberyard but only just sometimes. Rest of the time he was off hunting and fishing and trapping and getting himself into trouble. Well, you see the attraction. Who could resist a boy like that? Especially when you’re thirteen. And I was a kind of
developed
thirteen; I developed real early. I met him at a church picnic when he came with another girl, and it was love at first sight for both of us. He started up with me right then and there. After that, we would sneak off together every chance we got. Oh, we couldn’t keep our hands off each other! But one night my daddy found us.”

“Found you where?” Abby asked.

“Well, in the hay barn. But he found us … you know.” Mrs. Whitshank fluttered a hand in the air. “Oh, it was awful!” she said merrily. “It was like something out of a movie. My daddy held a gun to his neck. Then Daddy and my brothers ran him out of Yancey County. Can you believe it? Law, I think back on that now and it feels like it happened to somebody else. ‘Was that
me
?’ I say to myself. I didn’t lay eyes on him again for close onto five years.”

Abby had slacked off on the biscuit cutting. She was just standing there staring at Mrs. Whitshank, so Mrs. Whitshank took the glass from her and stepped in to finish up, making short work of it: clamp-clamp.

“But you kept in touch,” Abby said.

“Oh, no! I had no idea where he was.” Mrs. Whitshank was laying the biscuits in the greased skillet, edge to edge in concentric circles. “I stayed faithful to him, though. I never forgot him for one minute. Oh, we had one of the world’s great love stories, in our little way! And once we got back together again, it was like we’d never parted.
You know how that happens, sometimes. We took up right where we left off, the same as ever.”

Abby said, “But—”

Had it never crossed Mrs. Whitshank’s mind that what she was describing was … well, a crime?

Mrs. Whitshank said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you, though. It’s supposed to be a secret. I’ve never even told my own children! Oh, especially my own children. Merrick would make fun of me. Promise
you
won’t tell them, Abby. Swear it on your life.”

“I won’t tell a soul,” Abby said.

She wouldn’t have known what words to use, even. It was all too extreme and disturbing.

Mr. and Mrs. Whitshank and Red, Earl and Landis, Ward, Dane and Abby: eight people for lunch. (Merrick would not be eating with them, Mrs. Whitshank said.) Abby traveled around the table doling out knives and forks. The Whitshanks’ silverware was real sterling, embossed with an Old English
W
. She wondered when they had acquired it. Not at the time of their wedding, presumably.

Her parents just had dime-store cutlery, not all of it even matching.

Suddenly she felt homesick for her bustling, sensible mother and her kindly father with his shirt pocket full of ballpoint pens and mechanical pencils.

All the dining-room windows were open, the curtains wafting inward on the breeze, and she could see out to the porch where Pixie and Maddie sat in the swing with their backs to her, talking in soft, lazy voices. Merrick’s makeup session must be finished; Abby heard the shower running upstairs.

She went to the kitchen for plates, and as she returned, one of the chainsaws roared to life again. Till then, she hadn’t noticed the silence. The noise was so close that she bent to peer out a window
and see what was going on. Apparently the men were tackling what remained of the trunk. Landis stood to the left, watching, while Earl stooped low with his saw. He was working on the far side of the tree, nearly out of her angle of vision, probably cutting a notch so it would fall away from the house, but Abby couldn’t be sure from where she stood. She always worried men would get crushed doing that, although these two certainly looked as if they knew what they were doing.

She set the plates around and then counted out napkins from the sideboard and laid one beside each fork. She returned to the kitchen and asked Mrs. Whitshank, “Shall I pour the iced tea now?”

“No, let’s wait a bit,” Mrs. Whitshank said. She was standing at the stove frying chicken. “Go sit on the porch and cool off, why don’t you? I’ll call you when it’s time.”

Abby didn’t argue. She was glad to leave the hot kitchen. She untied her apron and draped it over the back of a chair, and then she went out to the porch and settled in one of the rockers some distance from Pixie and Maddie. She looked for Dane and found him hauling a huge leafy branch down toward the pile near the street. His hair took on an almost metallic sheen when he stepped into a shaft of sunshine.

What would she tell her mother? “I’m going to spend the night at Ruth’s,” she could say, except that then her mother might phone her at Ruth’s; it had been known to happen. And even if Abby dared to ask Ruth to cover for her, there was the problem of Ruth’s parents.

Red was tossing split logs into a wheelbarrow. Ward was mopping his forehead with his balled-up shirt. Earl killed the chainsaw just as Merrick stepped onto the porch and said, “Whew,” letting the screen door slam behind her. “Feels like I’ve washed a rubber mask off my face,” she told Pixie and Maddie. She was eating from a bowl of cornflakes. She walked over to a cane-bottomed chair, hooked it with one foot, and pulled it closer to the swing and sat down. Her
hair was still in curlers but she had on Bermudas now and a sleeveless white blouse.

“We were just wondering who the James Dean was,” Pixie told her.

“The who? Oh, that’s Dane.”

“He’s
gaw
-juss.”

“If next Saturday’s like today,” Merrick said, “my foundation’s going to streak clear off my face. And my mascara will give me raccoon eyes.”

“You’ll match your mother-in-law,” Maddie said with a giggle.

“Oh, just go ahead and kill me if I ever get circles like hers,” Merrick said. “You know what I suspect? I suspect she paints them on. She’s one of those people who like to look sick. She’s always trotting off to her doctor and of course he tells her she’s fine but when she comes back she says, ‘Well, he
thinks
I’ll be all right …’ ”

“Will he be at the wedding?” Pixie asked.

“Will who be at the wedding?”

“That Dane person.”

“Oh. I don’t know. Will Dane be at the wedding?” Merrick called down the porch to Abby.

Abby said, “He wasn’t invited.”

“He wasn’t? Well, feel free to bring him if you like.”

“Oh, you two go together?” Pixie asked Abby.

Abby gave a half shrug, hoping to imply that they did go together but that she could take him or leave him, and Pixie heaved a theatrical sigh of disappointment.

“Now, here is the sixty-four-dollar question,” Merrick said. “My curlers.”

“What about them?” Maddie asked.

“You see how big and bobbly they are. I’ve been going to bed in these since I was fourteen years old. My hair is straight as a stick otherwise. What am I going to do on my wedding night, is the question.”

“Ask me something hard,” Maddie said. “You go to bed without them, silly. Then early, early in the morning you wake up before Trey does and you sneak off to the bathroom and put your curlers in and take a hot shower. Don’t actually wet your hair; just steam it. Then get under the hair dryer—you’ll have to slip your hair dryer into the bathroom the night before—”

“I can’t bring my hair dryer on my honeymoon! It needs its own huge suitcase.”

“Then buy yourself one of those new kinds that you can hold in your hand.”

“What, and electrocute myself like that woman in the paper? Besides, you don’t know how stubborn my hair is. Two minutes of steam won’t have any effect at all.”

Pixie said, “You should do your hair like her.”

“Like who?”

“Her,” Pixie said, poking her chin in Abby’s direction. She was wearing a little smirk. “Abby.”

Merrick didn’t bother responding to that. “If I could just get away from Trey for a couple of measly hours,” she said. “If there was a beauty parlor in the hotel and it opened at five in the morning—”

The chainsaw roared up again, drowning out the rest of her words. Landis walked over to a dogwood tree and bent for a hoop of rope. Dane started up the hill toward where he’d left his axe.

Before the men came in for lunch they ducked their heads under the faucet at the side of the house, and so they walked in dripping wet, squeegeeing their faces with their hands. Earl actually shook himself all over, like a dog, as he took his seat.

Mr. Whitshank sat at the head of the table, Mrs. Whitshank at the foot. Abby sat between Dane and Landis. She and Dane were a good eighteen inches apart, but he slid his foot over so that it was touching
hers. He kept his eyes on his plate, though, as if he and she had nothing to do with each other.

Mr. Whitshank was holding forth on Billie Holiday. She had died a couple of days before and Mr. Whitshank couldn’t see why people were so cut up about it. “Always sounded to me like she couldn’t hold on to a note,” he said. “Her voice would go slippy-slidey and sometimes she’d mislay the tune.” He had a way of rotating his face slowly from one side of the table to the other as he spoke, so as to include all his listeners. Abby felt like some sort of disciple hanging on her master’s every word, which she suspected was his purpose. Then she altered her vision—she was good at that—and imagined she was sitting at a table of threshers or corn pickers or such, one of those old-time harvest gatherings, and this cheered her up. When she had a home of her own, she wanted it to be just as expansive and welcoming as the Whitshanks’, with strays dropping by for meals and young people talking on the porch. Her parents’ house felt so closed; the Whitshanks’ house felt open. No thanks to
Mr
. Whitshank. But wasn’t that always the way? It was the woman who set the tone.

“Now, the kind of music I favor myself,” Mr. Whitshank was saying, “is more on the order of John Philip Sousa. I assume you all know who I’m talking about. Redcliffe, who am I talking about?”

“The March King,” Red said with his mouth full. He was deep in a leg of fried chicken.

“March King,” Mr. Whitshank agreed. “Any of you recall
The Cities Service Band of America
?”

No one did, apparently. They hunkered lower over their plates.

“Program on the radio,” Mr. Whitshank said. “No kind of music but marches. ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ and ‘The Washington Post’ march, my favorite. I like to had a fit when they took it off the air.”

Abby searched for any trace in him of the wild boy from Yancey County. She could see why some might call him good-looking, with that straight-edged face of his and not a sign of a paunch even in his
fifties or maybe sixties. But his clothes were so proper, almost a caricature of properness (he had corrected the wayward lapel by now), and his eyes had a disenchanted droop at the outside corners. There were gnarly purple veins on the backs of his hands and distinct black dots of whiskers stippling his chin. Oh, let Abby not ever get old! She pressed her left ankle against Dane’s ankle and passed the biscuits on to Landis.

“My father thinks Billie Holiday’s the greatest,” Dane offered. He took a swig of his iced tea and then leaned back, clearly at ease. “He says Baltimore’s biggest claim to fame is, Billie Holiday used to scrub front stoops downtown for a quarter apiece.”

“Well, I and your father will have to agree to disagree,” Mr. Whitshank said. Then he gave a quick frown. “Who
is
your father?”

“Dick Quinn,” Dane said.

“Quinn as in Quinn Marketing?”

“None other.”

“Will you be going into the family business?”

“Nope,” Dane said.

Mr. Whitshank waited. Dane stared back at him pleasantly.

“I would think that would be a fine opportunity,” Mr. Whitshank said after a moment.

“Me and Pop tend not to see eye to eye,” Dane told him. “Besides, he’s ticked off because I got fired from my job.”

He seemed perfectly comfortable volunteering the information. Mr. Whitshank frowned again. “What’d they fire you for?” he asked.

“Just didn’t work out, I guess,” Dane said.

“Well, I tell Redcliffe, I say, ‘Whatever you do in life, do your best. I don’t care if it’s hauling trash, you do it the best it’s ever been done,’ I say. ‘Take pride in it.’ Getting fired? It’s a black mark on your record forever. It’ll hang around to haunt you.”

“This was at a savings and loan,” Dane said. “I have no plans to make my career in savings and loans, believe me.”

“The point is, what reputation you get. What opinion your
community has of you. Now, you may not feel that a savings and loan is your be-all and your end-all …”

How could this man have been the hero of Mrs. Whitshank’s romance? Whether you found it dashing or tawdry, at least it
had
been a romance, complete with intrigue and scandal and a wrenching separation. But Junior Whitshank was dry as a bone, droning on relentlessly while the other diners ate their food in dogged silence. Only his wife was looking at him, her face alight with interest as he discussed the value of hard labor, then the deplorable lack of initiative in the younger generation, then the benefits conferred by having lived through the Great Depression. If young folks today had lived through a depression the way
he
had lived through a depression—but then he broke off to call, “Ah! Going out with your buddies?”