Cementville (28 page)

Carl put his hand on her arm, and Maureen sat back in her chair. Maybe the soldier's blank stare meant he was trying to process her question, or questions—she hadn't meant to ask so many at once. Maureen was able to put the fake foot and the museum mannequin out of her mind, but in their place now was the dark hollow space inside a milk chocolate Easter bunny whose marzipan eyes can't see a thing.

A spray of starlings lifted noisily off a tree behind him so that it looked like birds were flying straight out of Harlan O'Brien's head.

“So, Harley, I was thinking we might go out this Sunday if you're up to it, maybe head toward Cumberland Gap this time,” Carl whispered in his creepy mental-institution voice.

The soldier's vacant face melted slightly, the marzipan eyes blinked. It was as if, with a single sentence, Carl breathed him to life. If you could call it life, the way Harlan O'Brien sat there blinking, blinking. But the two men did begin talking about the times they'd gone camping in the woods when they were boys, her uncle's soft whisper restoring Harlan O'Brien to what Maureen thought might be a feeble version of the person he once was. She listened as they talked, or Carl talked, mostly. Since her uncle had moved back into the house where they had both grown up, to the hometown where he had maybe killed a man, to the barn where he'd found his father swinging, Maureen had quit trying to figure out which thing took up a bigger percentage of her uncle's brain, the crazy or the brilliant.

The two men talked and the light faded and she felt herself fading too, into the waning afternoon. She remembered the new potatoes in her bag. Neither of the men appeared to notice when she went into the house carrying Katherine's offering.

Maureen did not find Lila O'Brien in the kitchen. She followed the sound of a voice up the stairs. Lila was probably in her bedroom, talking to someone on the phone. Maureen glided past the bathroom and glanced into a bedroom that she guessed must be Harlan's. She pushed the open door with one finger and stepped in, leaving the door ajar enough to hear Lila's voice so that she would know when her phone conversation was ending.

It was a typical boy's room, a lot like Billy's, painted a dusky blue, with blue and brown and tan curtains and matching bedspread in some woodsy print of trees and animals. Someone had arranged the soldier's medals in a neat row across the top of his dresser, and Maureen bet it was not Harlan.

She ran a finger across a complete set of Britannica and spun the globe on the walnut desk. Her mother would be ashamed of her, snooping around like this. She traced the spines of several books, some Twain, some Defoe, a worn copy of
Johnny Tremain
, the last book she had read at the end of the school year. There was a long set, eight or nine books, all of them about someone called Tristram, with a title that said it was his “Life and Opinions.” She made a mental note to consider that title for her own book:
The Life and Opinions of Maureen Juell
. She turned to head back out to the hallway when she spotted something sticking out from under the bed: a thickness of several blankets folded to a neat rectangle to make a sort of pallet. So it was true. People around town had said the lieutenant slept on the floor, couldn't get comfortable in a bed again. She knelt and reached under the box springs, ran a hand over the worn flannel blankets. Maybe he had a bad back, the fake leg throwing him off balance; she'd heard of that, how a limp could cause your body to lose its sense of symmetry. And before she knew what she was doing, she had crawled in and stretched out there beneath the coils of springs under Harlan O'Brien's bed. She breathed carefully in the tiny space. What was he thinking about when he lay down at night?

But surely Lila's phone call was over. Any minute she could come trilling down the hall. Maureen scooted out from under the
bed and, taking a last look around Harlan's room, stepped out into the hallway. She walked toward the bedroom at the other end, and as she got closer she was pretty sure that the sound she heard wasn't Lila O'Brien gossiping on the phone. It was muffled weeping, the woman's birdlike voice transformed to that of a child with a very particular heartache, and nobody to tell. This was the kind of moment when her mother knew exactly what to do, how to comfort the grieving and the frightened and the bewildered.

Maureen waited at the end of the hall, watching from the second-story window as Carl talked with Harlan O'Brien on the lawn below. Her uncle gestured broadly with his big hands and galumphed across the grass for a bit, miming some lumbering animal, at which the soldier nodded, maybe even smiled. Maureen suddenly saw why people loved Carl. He made them feel lucky.

She jabbed a finger in the pocket of her shorts and stroked the rabbit's foot she had found in the field behind their house at the beginning of summer. She'd been carrying it ever since. It could have once belonged to Billy, or even Uncle Carl, years ago. A tinge of color remained under one of the tiny claws. It must have been dyed green when it was new, the kind of dime-store novelty all the boys at Holy Ghost carried in their pockets for luck. The rabbit's foot had not brought her luck. Then again, neither had her uncle. But people seemed to like shooting the breeze with batty old Carl, so maybe she was lucky to have him following her around. They might loosen up and talk to him in a way they couldn't or wouldn't with a kid like her. Maybe the only way she was ever going to get any scoop on what had happened, what was happening, to her town was if people thought they were just passing time with Carl.

When Maureen had originally told Mrs. Cahill about her project, the librarian had suggested she talk to Giang Smith. Mrs. Cahill said Giang probably looked at Cementville with a different point of view, coming from so far away. But Maureen had never worked up the guts. Now Giang Smith was dead, and Maureen
could not put a finger on why she had never arranged an interview. She didn't want to think she was afraid of the Vietnamese woman's way of speaking, of the almond eyes so different from those of anybody she knew. War probably looked different, viewed through those eyes, when the place you lived was suddenly overrun with guns and helicopters and strange voices flying everywhere. Mrs. Cahill said that Giang Smith had come into the library often, looking for poetry. Listening to Lila O'Brien weeping at the other end of the hall, Maureen remembered finding a slip of paper in a library book a few weeks ago. Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay. The last person to check it out had been Giang Smith. The slip of paper was covered in curly letters with tiny dots and dashes and carat marks floating over them. Maybe it was a translation of the poem on the page next to it. In that poem, a woman was wiping away tears and imagining another woman named Penelope doing the same thing. There was something about weaving all day and undoing the weaving all night. The woman in the poem sounded tired and lonely, and maybe with a whiff of disgust.

Suddenly Lila O'Brien burst out of her bedroom and chirped, “What! Are the boys all out of lemonade? Well, we girls better get cracking then, hadn't we?” And she laid a feather-light arm across Maureen's shoulder and they went down to the kitchen for more refreshments before rejoining
the boys
on the lawn. They sat around the card table, Lila coaxing everyone into more brownies, and Maureen trying to figure out how to extricate herself from the failed afternoon. She remembered that Uncle Judge and Aunt Frances were coming for supper and was finally able to graciously (she thought with satisfaction) excuse herself and Carl.

They were hoofing it across the pasture for home when Maureen saw Ginny Ferguson emerge from the little house at the bottom of the hill and light out for the Juells' as if trying to outrun a swarm of yellow jackets.

“Oh, for Pete's sake,” Maureen said. “Wonder what she's crying about now.”

But there was something different in Virginia Ferguson's voice. Ginny caught up to them and threw her arms around Maureen and blubbered crazily into her hair. Maureen took hold of Ginny and shook her.

“What, Ginny? What—I can't understand you!”

“They found her! Oh, Maureen, they found her.”

“Found who?” Maureen wanted to be angry with the pregnant woman. She'd seen in movies how people slapped someone in the throes of hysterical fits in order to bring them to their senses, but Maureen just stood there, a bad feeling crawling into her stomach. She didn't want to say it again. “Who did they find, Ginny?”

“It's Augrey Oh, Maureen. Little Augrey is dead.”

PART III

But only return to me and repent and rend your heart; and rain will come, and milk and wine. I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten
.

—
P
ROPHETS:
J
OEL
REDUX

W
E ALL KNEW THE
F
ERGUSON KIDS LIVED A LITTLE TOO MUCH
like wild animals, eating ravenously of canned pork and beans and headcheese made in their own barn lot. They bathed as the notion took them in a sort of massive serial ritual, filling the rusted cast iron tub behind the trailer with scalding water, and one by one soaping several weeks' grime into the tubful of darkening gray soup. Augrey was
of
them, yet she was separate from—and if possible, more frightening than—the rest of Arlene Ferguson's brood.

Mothers were leery of girls like her. Augrey Ferguson was lean and strong—not the stringy, sinewy strong of most country kids—but thick and muscular, handsome as the finest hunting dog pup. Her skin was white against that orange-peel hair, even in summer, a sprinkle of persimmon freckles across the bridge of her round Scots nose.

Even when she was small she was capable of grotesque feats. She could hold on to an electric fence with both fists, her pelt of thick hair lilting in a crestfallen halo above her shoulders. She once stuck seven darning needles into the palm of her hand and held the hand straight out in front of her like a trophy for all the neighborhood kids to examine for a quarter apiece. She seemed always to have several mangled cigarettes in the pocket of her shorts and could perform on demand the stunt that was a particular favorite of her audience: Augrey inserted the lit end of a burning cigarette into her mouth and let the smoke flow out through her amazing flared nostrils.

Skills at which many country kids were proficient she elevated to an art form. Masterful tree climber. Fearless bareback rider—even of Trigger, the furious and starving stud kept locked in a neighbor's ramshackle paddock. In baseball, spot-on, first chosen for every team. The girl appeared to have been born immune to the usual dangers that stalked rural children. A boy pulled the rearing Trigger over onto himself, rupturing his spleen. A girl fell from a grapevine swing into a ravine, the breath knocked right out of her; she limped home with a fractured tailbone. Augrey's younger brother jumped from a hayloft and missed the haystack by eighteen inches, cracking three ribs. But Augrey emerged from the woods or the barn or the crow hunt with little more than the odd scratch.

Kids would have followed her anywhere, and usually did.

She got older and the feats were no less masterful and certainly no less physical in nature. At thirteen, she could fill out a pair of fishnet hose better than most women and she traipsed down Council Street every Saturday like she had someplace to be. At fourteen she had bedded more of the male faculty at the consolidated high school than—well, there is no fitting metaphor. At fifteen she was making better than egg money offering T&A shows after hours at Pekkar's Alley. Great little dancer, Augrey, hunting dog muscles all grown up. Her mother kicked her out of the house—or the trailer that particular branch of Fergusons were calling home at the time—after finding Augrey compromised under Arlene's new beau. Consigned her to Angus's care, if care is what you want to call it.

Then she seemed to just disappear. Nobody could decide where she went. She quit showing up at Pekkar's. Weeks went by without her coming home to Arlene's or Angus's place. Word got around the way it will: She was sleeping on a wad of blankets behind Nimrod Grebe's woodstove. Her brother Levon had seen it with his own eyes when he took the old man some fresh eggs. People shook their heads in astonishment but eventually ran out of ways to be appalled.

There was more than a bit of shame in the fascinated sadness we all felt when Levon's hounds came across Augrey's body in
shoulder-high thistles behind Judge Hume's black barn, cheap gold necklace tight around that pretty white neck like a garrote. It didn't take long for the coroner to declare the trail all but cold. That didn't make us stop speculating.