Morning Glory (49 page)

For a moment Elly closed her eyes, gulping, unable to swallow the lump of fear that suddenly congealed in her throat. Was it possible? Could he have done it again? She
opened her eyes and stared at her thumbs; they felt weighty and thrice their size as shock controlled her system.

Will watched the reactions claim his wife. He watched her struggle for control, watched her momentarily lose and regain it. When she lifted her eyes they were like two dull stones in a face like bleached linen.

“Will...?”

Though she spoke only his name, the single word was like a rusty blade in his heart.

Oh, Elly, Elly, not you, too.
They could all think whatever they wanted, but she was his wife, the woman he loved, the one who’d given him reason to change, to fight, to live, to plan, to make something better of himself. She thought him
capable
of a thing like this?

After a life filled with disappointments, Will Parker should have been inured to them. But nothing—nothing had ever reduced him like this moment. He stood before her vanquished, wishing that he had been in that foxhole with Red, wishing he’d never walked into this clearing and met the woman before him and been given false hope.

On the porch a door slammed and Thomas called, “Mama, what’s wrong?”

Elly didn’t hear him. “W–Will?” she whispered again, her eyes wide, her throat hot and tight.

Aggrieved, he turned away.

The sheriff reached to the back of his belt for a pair of handcuffs and spoke authoritatively. “William Parker, it’s my duty to inform you that you’re under arrest for the murder of Lula Peak.”

The awful reality hit Elly full force. Tears squirted into her wide, frightened eyes, and she pressed a fist to her lips. It was all happening so fast! The sheriff, the accusation, the handcuffs. The sight of them sent another sickening bolt through Elly.

At that moment Thomas eased up behind his mother. “Mama, what’s the sheriff doing here?”

She could only stand gaping, unable to answer.

But Will knew all about hurtful childhood memories and wanted none for Thomas. As the sheriff pulled his left arm
back and snapped the cuff on, Will ordered quietly, “Thomas, you go see after Lizzy P., son.” He stood woodenly, waiting for the second metallic click, cringing inside, thinking,
Dammit, Goodloe, at least you could wait till the boy goes back in the house!

But Thomas had seen too many cowboy movies to misinterpret what was happening. “Mama, is he takin’ Will to jail?”

Taking Will to jail?
Elly suddenly came out of her stupor, incensed. “You can’t just... just take him!”

“He’ll be in the county jail in Calhoun until bail is set.”

“But what about—”

“He might need a jacket, ma’am.”

A jacket? She could scarcely think beyond the frantic churning in her head that ordered, Stop him somehow! Stop him! But she didn’t know how, didn’t know her rights or Will’s. Tears slid down Elly’s cheeks as she stood by dumbly.

“Mama...” Thomas began crying, too. He ran to Will, clutched at his waist. “Will, don’t go.”

The sheriff pried the boy off. “Now, young man, you’d best go in the house.”

Thomas swung on him, pummeling with both fists. “You can’t take Will! I won’t let you! Git away from him!”

“Take him in the house, Mizz Parker,” the sheriff ordered in an undertone.

Thomas fought like a dervish, swinging, fending off their efforts to calm or remove him.

“Get in the car, Parker.”

“Just a minute, sheriff, please...” Will went down on one knee and Thomas threw himself on the man’s sturdy neck.

“Will... Will... he can’t take you, can he? You’re a good guy, like Hopalong.”

Will swallowed and turned entreating eyes up to Goodloe. “Take the cuffs off for a minute—please.” Goodloe drew in a deep, unsteady breath and glanced at Elly sheepishly. At his hesitation, Will’s anger erupted. “I’m not runnin’ anyplace, Goodloe, and you know it!” The sheriff’s distraught gaze fell to the boy sobbing against Will’s neck and he followed his gut instincts, freeing one of Will’s wrists. Will’s arms curled
around Thomas, the metal cuff dangling down the boy’s narrow back. Closing his eyes, Will clutched the small body and spoke softly against Thomas’s hair. “Yeah, you’re right, short stuff. I’m a good guy, like Hopalong. Now you remember that, okay? And just remember I love you. And when Donald Wade gets home from school tell him I love him, too, okay?”

He pushed Thomas back, wiped the child’s streaming face with the knuckles of his uncuffed hand. “Now you be good and go in the house, and help your mother take care of Lizzy. You do that for old Will, all right?”

Thomas nodded meekly, studying the ground at Will’s knee. Will turned him around and gave him a push on his backside. “Now, go on.”

Thomas ran around his mother, sobbing, and a moment later the screen door slammed. Elly watched Will stretch to his feet, his image a blur beyond her streaming eyes. With a wooden face he willingly put both hands behind himself and allowed the sheriff to snap the cuffs in place once more.

“Will—oh, Will—what—oh, God...” Elly moved at last, but her speech and motion patterns had turned jerky. She cast her gaze around like a demented thing, reaching out a hand, pacing like a wild animal the first time it’s caged, as if not fully comprehending its inability to change a situation. “Sheriff...” She touched his sleeve but he ignored her plea, tending his prisoner. Abruptly she veered to her husband. “Will...” She grasped him, clutching the back of his shirt, her wet cheek pressed to his dry one. “Will—they can’t t-take you!”

Unbending he stared straight ahead, and ordered coldly, “Let’s go.”

“No, wait!” Elly cried, overwrought, turning beetlelike from one man to the other, “Sheriff—couldn’t you—what’s going to happen to him—wait—I’ll get his jacket...” Belatedly she ran to the house, not knowing what else to do, returned panicked, to find both men already in the Plymouth. She tried the back door but it was locked, the windows up.

“Will!” she cried, pressing the jacket to the glass, already realizing what had caused his cold indifference, already repentant, needing to do something to show she’d been hasty and had reacted without conscious thought. “Here—here I
b-brought your jacket! Please, take it!” But he wouldn’t look at her as she pressed the denim against the glass.

The sheriff said, “Here, I’ll take it,” and hauled it in through his window and handed her, in exchange, the paint rag on which Will had earlier wiped his hands. “Best thing you can do, Mizz Parker, is get a lawyer.” He put the car in gear.

“But I don’t know no lawyers!”

“Then he’ll get a public defender.”

“But when can I see him?” she called as the Plymouth began to move.

“When you get a lawyer!”

The car pulled away, leaving Elly in a swirl of exhaust with her hand reaching entreatingly.

“Will!” she cried after the departing vehicle. She watched it carry him away, his head visible through the rear window. She twisted her fingers into the smelly rag and covered her mouth with it, hunched forward, breathing its turpentine fumes, fighting panic, staring aghast at the empty driveway.

The jail was in a stone building styled much like a Victorian house, situated just behind the courthouse where Will had gotten married. He held himself aloof from emotion during the booking procedure, the frisking, the walk down the echoing corridor, the cold metallic clang of the iron door.

He lay in his cell facing a gray wall, smelling the fetid odors of old urine and pine-scented disinfectant, on a stale-smelling pillow and a stained mattress, with ink on his fingertips and his belt confiscated and dullness in his eyes and the familiarity of his surroundings consciously shut out. He thought about hunkering in a ball but had no will to do so. He thought about crying but lacked the heart. He thought about asking for food, but hunger mattered little when life mattered not at all. His life had lost value in the moment when his wife looked at him with doubt in her eyes.

He thought about fighting the charges—but for what? He was tired of fighting, so damned tired. It seemed he’d been fighting his whole life, especially the last two years—for Elly, for a living, for respect, for his country, for his own dignity.
And just when he’d gained them all, a single questioning stare had undone him. Again. When would he learn? When would he stop thinking he could ever matter to anyone the way some people mattered to him? Fool. Ass. Stupid
bastard
! He absorbed the word, with all its significance, rubbed it in like salt in a wound, willfully multiplying his hurt for some obscure reason he did not understand. Because he was unlovable after all, because his entire life had proved him so and it seemed the unlovable ones like himself were put on this world to accumulate all the hurts that the lucky, the loved, magically missed. She couldn’t love him or she’d have jumped to his defense as thoughtlessly as Thomas had. Why? Why? What did he lack? What more must he prove?
Bastard,
Parker! When you gonna grow up and realize that you’re alone in this world? Nobody fought for you when you were born, nobody’ll fight for you now, so give up. Lay here in the stink of other men’s piss and realize you’re a loser. Forever.

In a clearing before a house on Rock Creek Road Eleanor Parker watched the law haul her husband off to jail and knew a terror greater than the fear of her own death, a desperation sharper than physical pain, and self-reproach more overpowering than the rantings of her own fire-and-brimstone grandfather.

She knew before the car disappeared into the trees that she had made one of the gravest mistakes in her life. It had lasted only a matter of seconds, but that’s all it had taken to turn Will icy. She had seen and felt his withdrawal like a cold slap in the face. And it was entirely her fault. She could well imagine what he was suffering as he rode to town with his hands shackled: desolation and despair, all because of her.

Well, blast it, she was no saint nor seraph! So she’d reacted in shock. Who in tarnation wouldn’t? Will Parker could no more kill Lula Peak than he could Lizzy P., and Elly knew it.

The fire-and-brimstone blood of Albert See suddenly leaped in her veins where it had been slogging since her birth, waiting a chance to flow hot for a cause. And what a cause—the love of her man. She’d spent too long finding it,
had been too happy enjoying it, had changed too beneficially under its influence to lose it, and him, now.

So she straightened her spine, cursed roundly and turned her terror into energy, her despair into determination and her self-reproach into a promise.

I’ll get you out of there, Will. And by the time I’m done you’ll know that what you saw in my eyes for that piddly instant didn’t mean nothing. It was human. I am human. So I made a mistake. Now watch me unmake it!

“Thomas, get your jacket!” Elly shouted, slamming into the house with yard-long strides. “And three extra diapers for Lizzy P. And run down in the cellar and fetch up six jars of honey—no, eight, just in case! We’re goin’ to town!”

She grabbed ration coupons, a peach crate for the honey, a tin of oatmeal cookies, a jar of leftover soup, Lizzy (wet pants and all), a skeleton key, and a pillow to help her see over the steering wheel. Within five minutes that wheel was shuddering in her hands, which were white-knuckled with fright. But fright wouldn’t stop Elly now.

She had driven only a few times before, and those around the yard and down the orchard lane. She nearly broke three necks shifting for the first time, felt certain she’d kill herself and her two young ones before she reached the end of the driveway. But she reached it just fine and made a wide right turn, missed the far ditch and corrected her course without mishap. Sweat oozed from her pores, but she gripped the wheel harder and
drove
! She did it for Will, and for herself, and for the kids who loved Will better than popcorn or movie shows or Hopalong Cassidy. She did it because Lula Peak was a lying, laying, no-good whore, and a woman like that shouldn’t have the power to drive a wedge between a husband and wife who’d spent damn near two years showing each other what they meant to one another. She did it because someplace in Whitney was a scum-suckin’ skunk who’d done Lula in and wasn’t going to get by with pinning the blame on
her
man! Nossir! Not if she had to drive this damned car clear to Washington, D.C., to see justice done.

She dropped Thomas, Lizzy P., the cookies and the soup at Lydia’s house with only a terse explanation: “They’ve arrested
Will for the murder of Lula Peak and I’m goin’ to hire a lawyer!” She drove at fifty bone-rattling miles an hour the rest of the way into town, past the square and out to the schoolhouse on the south side, where she flattened ten yards of grass before coming to a stop with the left front tire crushing a newly planted rosebush that the second-grade teacher, Miss Natalie Pruitt, had brought from her mother’s garden to beautify the stark schoolground. Elly left word that Donald Wade was to get off the bus at Lydia Marsh’s place, then backtracked to the library and accidentally drove the car up onto the sidewalk, parking. There it stayed, blocking pedestrians, while she ran inside and told the news to Miss Beasley.

“That piss-ant Reece Goodloe come out to the house and arrested Will for killing Lula Peak. Will you help me find a lawyer?”

What followed proved that if one woman in love can move mountains, two can turn tides. Miss Beasley outright plucked the books from the hands of two patrons, ordering, “The library’s closing, you’ll have to leave.” Her coat flew out behind her like a flag in high wind as she followed Elly to the door, already advising.

“He should have the best.”

“Just tell me who.”

“We’d need to get to Calhoun somehow.”

“I drove to Whitney, I can drive to Calhoun.”

Miss Beasley suffered a moment’s pause when she observed the Model A with its radiator cap twelve inches from the brick wall. The town constable came running down the sidewalk at that moment, shaking his fist over his head. “Who in the sam hell parked that thing up there!”

Miss Beasley poked ten fingers in his chest and pushed him back. “Shut up, Mr. Harrington, and get out of our way or I’ll tell your wife how you ogle the naked aborigines in the back issues of
National Geographic
every Thursday afternoon when she thinks you’re downstairs checking the Ten Most Wanted posters. Get in, Eleanor. We’ve wasted enough time.” When both women were in the car, bumping back down the curb, Miss Beasley craned around and advised in her usual unruffled, demogogic tone, “Careful for Norris and
Nat, Eleanor, they do a great service for this town, you know.” Down the curb they went, across the street and up the opposite curb, nearly shearing the pair of octogenarians off their whittling bench before Elly gained control and put the car in first. Miss Beasley’s breasts whupped in the air like a spaniel’s ears as the car jerked forward, sped around a corner at twenty miles an hour and came to a lurching halt beside the White Eagle gas pump on the adjacent side of the square. Four ration coupons later Elly and Miss Beasley were on their way to Calhoun.