Cementville (18 page)

“Hold on, hold on—now Death is Jewish?” It was better than the French accent, but still. Cementville's only Jewish family, the Kirshbaums, ran the clothing store on Council Street. The narrow aisles between dress racks and shirt boxes and lingerie provided another place for Wanda to hide, and she sometimes lurked there for the pleasure of listening to the Kirshbaums holler at one another in the stock room. She had picked up a few handy Yiddish phrases of her own, but rarely had the opportunity to put one to use.

“And call me Wanda,
oy gevald
,” she ventured.

“Wanda, she's asking for you. Please do come tomorrow at four for tea. Nurse always lays it out proper.” The dark stranger clasped his hands under his long chin like an English schoolgirl. “Cakes, crumpets, and lots of sugah!”

“I don't think people in Cementville eat crumpets. Biscuits, yes. Scones and crumpets, no. Do you always get involved in patching things up between people?”

“All part of the job.”

They strolled like old companions back to the house and Wanda couldn't help noticing how similar their frames were. They could have been cousins to Oz's lanky Scarecrow. Death left her at the door and she watched him fade off down the road toward town. He looked lonely, stooped, yet at the same time somehow tireless.

S
HE WOKE IN
P
OOSE'S EASY
chair around five with a stiff neck. There was a knot in her back and when she reached behind her, she half-expected to find a ball of scraggly black wool. Wanda laughed when she pulled out the familiar red yarn still attached to Valine's little cancer cap.

Out the kitchen window the rising sun lit up Juell Ridge. She put water on to boil for the coffee and before long heard her mother stirring at the top of the stairs. Loretta's lupus was flaring up again, badly this time. Loretta refused to move to the downstairs bedroom, so Wanda held her breath each morning while her mother gripped the banister and crept down the steps sideways like a crab. She thought about not mentioning her plan of calling on Loretta's nemesis of a mother-in-law. But who was she kidding? Lying to her mother, even by omission, was out of the question.

“I think I'll go into town this morning,” Wanda said over a bowl of oatmeal. She avoided Loretta's eyes and focused on the cloud of hair. The notorious Ferguson red never quite disappeared. On Loretta, it had become a swirl the color of ripe cantaloupe riddled with silver wire.

Loretta had been a looker in her day, generous of figure and fair in the old Scots way. Wanda's favorite rainy afternoons were spent perusing musty albums stuffed with snapshots, lingering over pictures of her parents on their honeymoon in the Great Smoky Mountains. Even in the black and white photograph, Wanda could see Loretta's long strawberry tresses trailing over Stanley's shoulder as he pressed her in a kiss, his shiny black hair glinting in the sun. It was a secret she kept from her mother, the nearly operatic version of her parents' brief and flaming passion, Wanda's prized creation. She imagined the stranger they asked to click the button on their Brownie Flash, pictured the stranger's smile warmed by Loretta and Stanley's fire, up there in the Smokies. They had run off on Loretta's sixteenth birthday and been married in Gatlinburg, a transgression beyond all forgiveness as far as the bluestocking Evelyn Slidell was concerned.

“Town?” Wanda's mother was a woman of scant words, masterful at getting everything out of her daughter by employing as few syllables as possible.

“Fryers are on sale at the A&P,” Wanda said now, “so I was going to stock the freezer. I thought I'd spend a little time at the library, pick up a new novel, some knitting books, maybe. I'm bored with these patterns I've used a jillion times. I'll work my shift while I'm there—Charlene no doubt has several cartloads of books that need reshelving. She never manages to get to them all on her own, you know. Can I get something at the library for you? Oh, and I heard Mrs. Slidell has been sick. I thought I might drop by and see her. And of course I ought to run by the Cahills' house and give June this cap I made for her cousin—remember Valine? Whose hair has all fallen out from the chemo and radiation? You remember Valine. She was two years behind me at Holy Ghost?”

“Mrs. Slidell?”

Wanda knew it wouldn't slip by her mother. Nothing ever did. “I heard she's pretty bad off. I don't know any details, but she's a lonely old woman and I didn't figure it would hurt to let her know somebody cared enough to stop in and say hello. Now that she's going downhill.”

“Why?” Loretta set her cup in its saucer without a click.

“I know what you're driving at, Mother. As a grandmother, she has expressed no interest in me, and there's never been any love lost on my part either. But I look at it this way—I could be in her shoes someday. Let's face it, I am no prize. The likelihood of me living out my days alone grows greater with each passing moment. When the time comes that I find myself in Evelyn Slidell's position, you will please pardon me for hoping somebody out there might bequeath a minute of their time to visit a lonely woman passing out of this plane and on to the next.”

She helped Loretta get situated with her books and pillows in the front room. Wanda pulled on her summer sweater, a favorite despite the fact that it had shrunk in the sleeves, leaving her wrists
gangling a good four inches from the cuffs. “You didn't say—do you want anything from the library?”

“Maybe some Virginia Woolf,” Loretta said, and then, in the way she always began sentences of a cautionary nature, “Wanda Ferguson Slidell, that woman is mean.”

“For somebody who professes such disdain for the upper classes, you sure are fond of your blue-blood Brit-lit.” Wanda grabbed the keys to the Plymouth Fury off their hook by the kitchen door. “And I will don my evil deflectors before entering the dragon's castle, Mother, not to worry.”

W
ANDA SQUEEZED INTO A NARROW
parking space at the library, right behind the dumpster, and sat for a good five minutes before the mad rabbit of her heart stopped its thumping. She tied a scarf over her head and pulled a pair of sunglasses out of the glove compartment. It was childish, thinking they protected her. But when she was having a really bad spell, the sunglasses did seem to help. She slipped through the back door into the Saint Brigid College Library and almost ran across the marble lobby to the wide stairs leading to the upper stacks. Charlene Cahill, her friend June's mom and Cementville's lone librarian, waved as Wanda flashed through.

Wanda set aside two lace-knitting books whose patterns she hadn't already plundered,
Best American Short Stories of 1968
, and
The Waves
for Loretta. She busied herself with reshelving until Charlene closed the library at four, then followed her home to the Poplar Bluff subdivision.

Wanda had grown to enjoy visiting with her friend's mom before June's shift at the cement plant ended. Charlene Cahill was a good friend to Wanda in her own right. She was as extravagant with words as Loretta was frugal. Conversing with Charlene required no expenditure of energy or concentration on the part of the other person, so Wanda always brought along her knitting. She got the cable straightened out in Valine's little red cap while Charlene recited the
catalog of what all she was planning on putting up from the garden this summer. Wanda pictured the Cahill cellar already bursting with ten years' worth of jarred tomato juice, sauerkraut, and pear butter. June and Charlene lived alone now that Mr. Cahill was gone, so who was going to eat all that? Wanda couldn't find fault with it though. Her own knitting was no different from Charlene's canning. It was what they measured time with. Three afghans, five sweaters, four or five shawls, countless mittens and socks—for Wanda that was a year. For Charlene, a year was thirty quarts of vegetable soup, twenty of grape juice, umpteen pints of apple pie filling.

Wanda had to admit it—they were the same woman. But Charlene Cahill had managed to get married and appeared to be immune to panic attacks.

Half-listening to Charlene, Wanda worked her way to the crown of the cap and thought back to a time when she didn't even know what a panic attack was. She had just turned sixteen and had watched Mem take her last breath.

The night before Mem's funeral, Wanda was in the kitchen putting away leftovers. Loretta and Poose had gone to bed, worn out with the waking. All Poose's and Mem's old friends had gone home, and every surface in the kitchen was covered with casseroles, endless loaves of home-baked bread wrapped in tinfoil, and frosted jam cakes on crystal cake stands. Wanda wondered why people always brought so much food to wakes, when the last thing a grieving person wanted to do was eat. She turned on the radio and waltzed to the table, singing softly with Johnny Cash. She was scraping the last glob of scalloped potatoes out of Charlene Cahill's CorningWare and into the slop bucket when a movement on the other side of the room caught her eye. She turned to see a grisly shadow in the doorway.

“Uncle Angus—” Wanda tried to keep her voice even.

“Sorry about yer granny, girl,” he slurred and opened wide the screen door and lurched into the kitchen.

“Everybody's gone to bed. The funeral's tomorrow.”

It was general knowledge that Angus Ferguson in his younger days had blacked the eyes of his wife Maddie and daughters, Bett and Arlene, on a regular basis. Broken bones. Other things, never mentioned, in Wanda's presence at least, above a whisper. Her grandparents kept mum regarding the stain of generational violence on the Ferguson name. In fact their connection to the clan was rarely discussed at all, and Wanda was for the most part content to remain ignorant. But a person couldn't help hearing talk in town. She had caught a glimpse once of Angus's hunched-over wife at the Kirshbaums' store. Maddie Ferguson lurched down the narrow aisles with the demeanor of an adolescent girl who'd been suddenly turned into a broken-nosed troll by some witch's curse.

That night in the kitchen, the unkempt old man staggered toward Wanda with his arms spread wide as if gathering in the cloud of his whiskey breath.

“Ah lof yoo lil gurrl,” he blubbered, throwing his bulk at her. He fell on top of her, his skull banging loudly against the wall. He pinned Wanda's flailing arms above her head with one big paw and jerked up her skirt with the other.

Suddenly Poose's shotgun divided the narrow space between them, the gun's barrel pressed to his brother's temple. Wanda could see the throb of his blood there.

“Git, Angus,” Poose said softly.

Angus Ferguson slammed the screen door behind him and stumbled off into the dark.

Then Mem's funeral. When Wanda fainted at the graveside, people took it as the grief. In the silence around the house over the following days, Wanda began to wonder if it had happened at all, the thing with Uncle Angus, except for the bruises along her knobby spine. She would steal glances at Poose, waiting for him to mention it to her in private, to say something that would ease her fear. He never returned her looks, never mentioned what had happened that night.

Over and over again in the following days she grew dizzy over seemingly nothing. She worried she was losing her mind—the
fluttering in her chest, the sudden unbearable perspiration, the pounding in her head. It was months before she could bring herself to tell Loretta about it.

With the help of her mother—and Charlene and June Cahill—Wanda finished out high school, dragging herself through each day in a violet cloud of anxiety. She made it all the way until Poose himself passed on, and then it was as if her last protection was gone. From there, things had only gone from near intolerable to worse.

Wanda sat in the Cahill kitchen with Charlene now, listening to the woman's comforting litany of domestic accomplishments, envying her homey pleasures. June sagged in around four thirty covered in gray dust. Wanda's friend had been lucky—or unlucky, depending on your point of view—to land a desk job at the cement plant. June had been almost pretty once. The walls of the drab Slidell Cement office did not prevent the lime and grit from finding its way into every pore, every fiber of her clothing. She grabbed a Pabst Blue Ribbon for herself and a Grape Nehi for Wanda out of the fridge. They went outside and sank into the swing under Charlene's grape arbor.

“I hear that crazy fuck Carl Juell has been let out of the nuthouse,” June said. The smoke from her cigarette curled its fingers into Wanda's nose.

Wanda felt her face flush. This was not a subject she was prepared to discuss. “That was so sad about Jimmy Smith's wife,” she said.

“Awful,” June said, and pulled long at her bottle of beer. “You think Harlan O'Brien did it?”

Wanda looked at her friend in astonishment. “Of course I don't think Harlan did it! Why on earth would you say that? The poor man can barely string a sentence together, June.”

“I heard the DA wanted to arrest him, but Judge Hume put the kibosh on it. War hero and all.” June inhaled deeply on her cigarette. “Strictly hush-hush.”

“I'm sure the DA wants no such thing.” Wanda rolled her eyes, but her friend wasn't looking at her. “Rumor loves nothing so much
as filling the void where no story exists.” Wanda had her own theories about the Vietnamese woman's brutal slaying but wasn't sure now was the time to mention it. June had stuck by Wanda, in her way, through all the permutations of her condition, had driven her every day of that last miserable year of high school, had encouraged her to apply for the scholarship to Saint Brigid and to finish her bachelor's in linguistics. She had been trying lately to draft Wanda into what passed for a social life in Cementville, which as far as Wanda could see consisted of drinking at Pekkar's Alley, which was no doubt where June got the ridiculous idea that Harlan O'Brien had murdered Giang Smith.