Cementville (5 page)

“Sweet Jesus in heaven!” Virginia Ferguson said, waiting for them at the door, her voice trembling. She was staring beyond them. Then Willis, following the line of her gaze, saw it. His machine shop was buried under the oak tree, its massive trunk
bisecting the roofline. The grownups all stood as if they had sprouted roots right through the kitchen floor.

“You can set me down, Daddy,” Maureen said. But he carried her upstairs and her mother put her in bed against her protests.

Are you all right, she'll be all right, I'm all right
. Ginny Ferguson had followed them upstairs, and all three adults were exchanging opinions on the extent of damage, real, potential, and imagined. Then there was the litany of blessings, the discussion of luck that always seemed to mean a lot to grownups at such times. Maureen herself could not decide whether she had been lucky or cheated out of finally having something truly exciting happen to her. She did not feel the way she imagined you were supposed to feel after being knocked down by a bolt of lightning. Katherine pulled the sheet over her and rubbed her arm.

“Mr. Juell, I believe your girl saved your life,” Ginny said. “Her and Jesus.”

Katherine and Willis stared at her blankly.

“You ran out to get to her only seconds before that tree came crashing down and cut that shop smack in two,” Ginny said.

This was an angle Maureen had not thought of. She looked back and forth between the three adults to gauge how magnificent this thing might be. She felt a poem coming on, but as quickly as a phrase came to mind it vanished, just as the lightning bolt had done. She sunk into the pillow and looked at the ceiling where a spider the color of putty picked its careful way toward the corner.

“The main thing is nobody is seriously hurt,” Katherine said. She did not place much stock in coincidence, much less divine intervention. “You don't hurt anywhere, do you, honey?” She rubbed at Maureen's heel, which did not look a lot different from the way it looked before.

“Ow,” Maureen said without conviction. The truth was the sting had disappeared minutes after it had all been over. “Curly got hurt,” she said. “Curly's dead, isn't she?”

“We'll worry about that later. You rest,” Katherine told Maureen, “and stay away from the windows.”

Maureen listened to the grownups trundling down the stairs, their voices falling into that odd sorting of what to do next, as adults will after a hubbub. Ginny sounding fractious and entirely ready to be off this hill, Katherine trying to persuade her to wait out the storm, Willis insisting that he would drive her home.

On her bedside table sat the stack of summer reading Maureen had brought home from the library. The room had grown dim enough with the storm that she switched on the lamp and settled into her pillow with
Bleak House
. She skimmed the first page, determined not to be put off by the fact that she did not know what a chancery was. Dickens was a first-class noticer of gloom and smoke and rain and fog. All the books she had chosen had scary titles that sounded as if they might shed light on possession by spirits.
The House of the Seven Gables. We Have Always Lived in the Castle
. Maureen believed she lived in a house haunted by ghosts—four, as best she could count—and she had resolved that this would be the year she finally communicated with at least one of them. The lightning strike might actually have been a stroke of luck in this regard. Granny Ricketts, the closest thing Cementville had to a witch, had told her that people who survive a lightning strike often end up with special powers.

Maureen closed the book and pulled a cardboard box from under the bed. She opened the hinged game board flat. The four corners each held an answer: Yes, No, Hello, Goodbye. Maureen took out the heart-shaped wooden pointer thing (Augrey Ferguson called it the
planchette
, which sounded very authentic) and placed it in the center of the board. She rested her fingertips on it lightly the way Augrey had shown her.

“What. Is. Your. Name?” Maureen whispered, and waited for the pointer to move among the letters of the alphabet arched across the board. Nothing. She did not want to believe she'd been gypped. She kept an ear cocked toward the staircase lest her mother decide to check on her. Regarding matters of the occult, Katherine was at least in partial agreement with the nuns at school—such things were
gateways, if not for the devil, certainly for morbid thoughts that ought not occupy an adolescent mind.

Not to mention Maureen had traded her brother's Led Zeppelin album for it, her first real foray into dicey behavior. The thrill of stealing (
borrowing
, really, since she absolutely would replace the album before Billy got home) was enhanced by association with the notorious Augrey Ferguson. Some people called Augrey a slut, but she had offered to throw in a deck of tarot cards for a forty-five of anything by the Temptations, which Maureen thought was nice. “My brother doesn't have any soul,” Maureen had told the girl, “only hard rock. Won't your mom get suspicious if too many of her things go missing?”

She could not translate Augrey's snort.

Maureen suspected it was the misfortune of being born a Ferguson that gave weight to the rumors about Augrey. Augrey's mother, Arlene, had six or seven kids whose several unknown fathers she had never bothered with marrying, and she lived in a house trailer (a “mobile home,” Augrey was always correcting people) in Taylortown with the blacks and the other poor people. Augrey's big brother Levon, who blacked the eyes of poor Ginny, was hated or feared or both by everybody in Cementville.

It occurred to Maureen that this was the sort of stuff she ought to be writing in her diary. She jumped out of bed and ran to the window, because it also occurred to her that she had left her diary in the grass by the swing, and now it was buried under a three-hundred-year-old oak tree, its clean white pages surely soaked to a pulp.

There were her mother's footsteps on the stairs. Maureen folded the Ouija board into the unmarked box and tried to shove it under her bed. Too late. Katherine set down a tray of toasted cheese sandwiches.

“What—?” she started to ask.

Maureen burst into tears. “My diary . . . it's under the tree!” she managed to get out between sobs.

“We'll get another. It only came from Newberry's,” Katherine said. She took Maureen in her arms and rocked her as she had not done in a good while. “What were you putting away when I came in?”

Maureen dried her face with her arm. “Nothing.”

Katherine bent over and pulled the box out. She glanced at Maureen once, giving her a last opportunity to come clean, before opening the board wide enough for a good look.

“Where did this come from?”

Maureen stared out the window. The rain seemed to be slowing. “My diary . . .” she tried weakly again, almost forcing her voice to tears.

“Maureen, I'm going to put this away until you're ready to tell me where you got it.”

“I traded something for it. With a girl I know.” She looked at her mother again. “Please. I need it.”

“Need it? Sweetheart, there is nothing this meaningless scrap of cardboard can do for you.”

“Then why won't you let me keep it?” Maureen was crying in earnest now.

But Katherine thrust the box under her arm and turned for the door.

Maureen said, “Granny Ricketts said people who survive a lightning strike can take on special powers—”

“Have you and Edward been pestering Adelaide Ricketts again? You know that poor woman isn't right in the head.”

“She gave Bran Miller a snakestone after he got struck by lightning, and let him keep it for a whole year to protect him from becoming a human lightning rod. Because snakestones give you dreams that make you prophesy!” Maureen could see she was getting nowhere fast. “Eddie told me all about it, see, you can prophesy and know when the next storm is coming. Granny said being struck once is almost guaranteed magic, but twice could be curtains.” The words gushed out, and a sudden pounding in her head made her fall back on the pillows again. “Miss Raedine made Bran give it back and now look what's happened to Bran!”

Her mother sat on the bed and pushed the short bangs from Maureen's forehead and felt for fever. “I don't care what Willis says, I'm calling Doctor Carruthers.” She examined Maureen's heel again.

“Mom, just think,” Maureen said, whispering now, “Between the new special powers and the Ouija board, and maybe a snake-stone, I might be able to talk to them.”

“Talk to who, honey?”

“You know.” Maureen gave her a knowing look.

Katherine's face shifted from concern to impatience. Maureen wondered if her mother believed in anything at all that was truly mysterious. She longed for Katherine just once to come out and say that Maureen was right, there certainly was a whiff of the Forsaken Bride's perfume in the northwest bedroom closet, or to admit that, during the night, she had heard the shuffling gait of the Bloody Groom in the downstairs hall. Maureen had given names to all the ghosts in the Juell house, at least the ones she could identify so far. Another thing to be annotated in her diary—which now would have to be replaced.

“For the last time, there are no ghosts in this or any other house. Anyway, we're not even sure you were actually struck by lightning,” Katherine said. “The charge had probably dissipated by the time it reached you.”

“What difference does that make? You never want anything extraordinary to happen in my life!”

It was obvious her mother was trying her best not to smirk. “Something tells me your life is going to be extraordinary, regardless of what I want.”

Maureen tried not to be pleased.

Katherine brought the tray of toasted cheese sandwiches to the bed, and the two of them ate together. It was a rare treat, getting to eat in bed. Her mother wasn't even minding the crumbs.

“Will we go to the funerals?”

“I don't know if that's a good idea. I mean, I'm sure either your father or I will try to attend most of them. But sweetheart, it doesn't sound like an experience you need to go through.”

“Not even Bran's? Eddie is practically my best friend.” Maureen had not admitted to her mother that Eddie Miller was in fact her only
friend. But thinking about the funeral Masses that would be spread through the week, the smoky incense trailing out of Father Oliver's brass censor, the candles and the choir, it all made her suddenly very tired. “Do you think the Hupmobile is all right?” Maureen asked.

“I hadn't even thought of that.” Katherine held her sandwich in midair. “Don't mention it to your father,” she whispered, as if Willis might hear. “Oh, he's going to be grieving if anything happens to that—”

Maureen knew she was about to call it a hunk of junk. Katherine would never say such a thing to Willis's face, but Maureen had heard her talking to Raedine Miller about the Hupmobile. Old cars were on the list of things Katherine Juell could not see the purpose of; she would be the first to acknowledge that she wasn't much of a sentimentalist.

“Don't worry, Mother. I know how Daddy is. Remember when Blue died? How he wouldn't look straight at anybody for two days? You always know he's eaten up with something when he gets that way.” Willis had been forced to shoot his old bluetick hound after he was bitten by a rattler.

Katherine ruffled Maureen's bangs again. “Such an old soul! Are you hurting anywhere, honey? Tell the truth now.”

Maureen shook her head. Before she could make another plea for the release of the Ouija board, she was asleep.

W
HEN SHE WOKE, THE SUN
was full out, as if it really had all been a dream. Outside, voices strained to be heard above the rumble of her father's tractor. Katherine was directing him toward a suitable burial spot in a corner of the garden. Maureen watched from the upstairs window as Willis looped a chain around Curly's hindquarters. Unbidden, a vague memory floated up to her, of the day Curly had come to them, an anniversary gift from Willis's elderly Aunt Janine. “What on earth—” her mother had said before bursting into tears. That she detested the smell of pigs was a known fact. That Willis's
jealous maiden aunt still saw Katherine as a city-bred outsider, years after her nephew had brought her home for a bride, was equally known. But the pig, a blotchy pink thing just off its mother's milk, followed Katherine around like a dog, ensuring that the sausage mill would not be her fate. She soon grew into a handsome Chester White with black spots. Katherine said, “Oh, Will!” when he teased her about being a city girl with a pet pig, but it was clear that Curly was destined for a life of ease and table scraps. Until this day anyway.

Maureen ran to the garden and followed along behind the tractor as it dragged the pig's carcass to the hole her father had dug. Curly rolled with a dull thump into her grave. Low thunder grumbled in the distance.

“The storm's moving off,” Willis said.

Katherine, wary of the angry clouds still glowering over the south end of the valley, was not satisfied. “It's foolish for us to be out here. Maureen, come inside, and Willis, you get this contraption put away and—” A deafening boom made Katherine jump.