Rock of Ages (2 page)

Forsythia Crumpler was a lifelong member of Geddie Presbyterian Church, and Georgia would see her on a more or less regular basis until she finished college and moved away permanently. For years, she and her old teacher would exchange gifts long-distance at Christmas—always a paperback version of some book one was sure the other would particularly like. Georgia did not remember when or why they stopped.

In the 11 years since her father's death, Georgia had only been to East Geddie five times, visiting Jenny each time but only crossing over the tall hedge that bordered the McLaurins' yard on two occasions to say hello to her favorite teacher. The last time had been three years ago.

Georgia looked around, but did not see her old teacher anywhere in the thinning crowd.

“I think she went back home,” Wade Hairr said. “She identified the, ah, deceased, and then she left.”

Georgia started to walk across the yard, in search of Forsythia Crumpler, and then stopped.

“Why was she out there by the pond in the first place? I know she couldn't swim at all.”

The sheriff looked away, as if pondering life's mysteries.

“Well, you know how old people are,” he said. “You can't tell what they're liable to do. Maybe she was just going out to feed the fish or something.”

“But she definitely drowned, right?”

“Right.”

Georgia found a gap in the photinia hedge between Jenny's wooden two-storey house and Forsythia Crumpler's brick rancher. She walked along the edge of the thick grass until she found the flagstone walk, Justin and Leeza following in her steps.

She rang the bell, noticing as she did that everything that could be painted apparently had been in the last few months.

A few seconds later, the door opened a couple of feet.

“Mrs. Crumpler? It's me. Georgia. Georgia McCain. I just wanted to thank you …”

Forsythia Crumpler was no more than 5 feet tall, and Georgia supposed she must be 80 years old herself, but she still had a presence. Maybe it was the ice-blue eyes that still burned brightly, or the way she carried herself, chin still jutting forward. Even bifocals didn't do much to soften her.

“I know who you are,” she said to Georgia and the pair standing behind her on the lowest step.

“I just wanted to thank you …”

“Let me ask you something.” Forsythia Crumpler stepped out on her front porch, barely leaving room for her guest. “When was the last time you saw Jenny McLaurin? When was the last anybody came to see her, other than me and her circle-meeting group, or maybe those sorry Blackwells now and then? You know she would cry sometimes, talking about how she didn't have any family anymore, how lonesome she got.”

Georgia moved back as far as she could, the hollies that surrounded the porch pricking her rear and legs.

Forsythia Crumpler seemed to be just getting started. It looked as if she might have been crying.

“I didn't know …” Georgia began, trying to gain some conversational traction.

“You didn't even send her a Christmas card last year,” the older woman exclaimed. “She was so hurt that she told me about it.”

“Why didn't somebody tell me?”

“Tell you to send her a Christmas card?”

Georgia hadn't sent any Christmas cards, something she didn't think was worth introducing as an ameliorating factor.

“Why didn't someone tell me she was so lonely? I could have come to see her.”

Forsythia Crumpler shook her head in disgust.

“I wish I had. But you know Jenny. Or I suppose you do … did. She was proud. She specifically told me not to write you, every time I threatened to. I wish to God I had anyhow, though. We tried to look out for each other, two old ladies without any family to speak of.” She nearly spit the last part out.

Georgia could feel the stares of Justin and Leeza behind her.

“I sent her money,” she said, regretting it even as she said it.

“Money. Fifty dollars a month. Not enough to keep her from canceling her subscription to the paper. I let her borrow mine.”

“She canceled her subscription to the paper?” Jenny would read the newspaper front to back. Even Georgia remembered that.

“I'll bet you don't even know about the Blackwells, do you?”

Georgia shook her head. “The Blackwells?”

“This is how lonesome and scared she was. She was so lonely, so worried that nobody would look after her, that she might die alone, that she gave up her house.”

“What do you mean, gave up her house? She was living here, wasn't she?”

The older woman stopped to catch her breath.

“Well,” she said after a few seconds, “you'll find out about it pretty soon, I suppose. I'm not the one who ought to be telling you.

“I'll tell you this, though, Georgia McCain. I am purely ashamed of you. How long have you been back down here, a week?”

Georgia could only nod.

“And you hadn't come by here once. Not once. She knew you were here, too. I taught you better than that, girl, and your momma and daddy taught you better. Jenny McLaurin was family. Your family.”

“We didn't know she was this bad off,” Justin said, the first time he'd spoken.

Forsythia Crumpler gave him the same laser glare she had used to pin smart-ass seventh-grade boys to the wall for 40 years. Georgia saw him take a half-step backward.

“Son,” the older woman said, looking down at him, “nobody ever knows anything they don't want to know.”

Georgia could feel the tears welling up. Her eyes burned.

Her old teacher turned again to her.

“Georgia McCain,” she said, in a voice appropriate for a star student caught cheating on a final exam, “I thought I would always be proud of you.”

And then she turned and walked, stiff with pride and arthritis, back into her brick rancher, shutting the door quietly but firmly.

CHAPTER TWO

October 18

Even before Georgia took her sabbatical, before she packed what she could in a hurry and drove south, the monkey was on her.

She used to be a world-class sleeper.

If thunder or snoring awakened her in the middle of the night, no matter. Five minutes later, she would be out again, sometimes stepping back into the same dream as if picking up a novel she had just put down. It was a pleasure to look at the bedside clock and see that she had two more hours, or even just one, before the alarm rang.

“If they ever make sleeping an Olympic sport,” Phil would say, “Georgia's got the gold wrapped up.”

Recently, though, a strange noise or a full bladder has meant she might as well get up and write a letter or grade some papers. Even on nights when she felt she never wanted to rise again, she could not get back to sleep.

In her father's time, the monkey would “get” tobacco croppers on a hot and muggy Carolina day. The phrase stuck with Georgia and has evolved perfectly into the beast that sits on her runaway heart and whispers all the worries of the world into her nocturnal ear.

She writes some of it off to the onset of menopause, some to the losses and worries that seem harder to shake every year.

Something like Jenny's death just makes the monkey weigh a little more and jabber a little more insistently.

She looks over at the bedside clock. She's been awake for at least an hour, and it's only 4:30. The little gadget that approximates the sound of rain on the roof roars away, but it only makes her want to get up and go to the bathroom.

Why am I here? Why did I come at all? I could be worthless as shit up in Montclair, without the bother of packing and moving
.

When it came to her late father's house, Georgia never really had a plan.

It was built in the 1890s. Its kitchen and bathrooms were last modernized 30 years ago.

It is a fine example of a North Carolina farm dwelling belonging to a family that was able to replace what needed replacing and careful or lucky enough not to burn it down. Vinyl siding covers the old pine boards, and the red tin roof is only 12 years old. The windows are modern and double-paned; Georgia had them replaced only seven years ago, after consecutive tenants had complained about water leaking in and warm air leaking out. There is central air conditioning and gas heat.

It has two stories, five usable bedrooms, a living room, dining room and kitchen, plus two baths. The back porch is screened; the front is not. It sits on as good a hill as East Geddie has to offer.

Georgia started renting it to strangers because Kenny Locklear said he knew someone who wanted to move out to the country and would pay a relatively good price. She always balked at selling, even if it was the last place on Earth that she would ever want to live.

But the renters started staying for shorter and shorter periods, opting for a mobile home or an apartment in town, and the gaps between them seemed to widen.

Twice, despite Kenny's best efforts, thieves broke in while the house was unoccupied.

The first time, they got some of the old furniture stored in one of the downstairs bedrooms, things Georgia didn't want to sell or move, and the dining room chandelier.

The second time, they took copper pipe from underneath the house and an old bureau that had been in the family at least since her father was a boy. They also stole, apparently for meanness, old annuals and other books that had been in the plunder room for decades. That time, just three months ago, the intruders evidently had been so put out by the lack of theft possibilities that one of them had defecated in the middle of the living room floor.

“I'm sorry,” Kenny had told her when he called her that time. “If I could catch the bastards, I'd shoot 'em.”

That was in August. Georgia saw it as a sign. She had told Justin, who was as much at liberty as she was, that she planned to sell the farm, or as much of it as they still owned. He surprised her by offering to go down and get it ready to show. He had become quite handy in the Peace Corps, and there were many things that needed attention.

And Leeza, already five months pregnant then, seemed eager to go with him. Perhaps they welcomed the chance to be somewhere by themselves, Georgia thought, under some roof that could at least temporarily be theirs alone.

The open house came and went with no serious interest, and the farm has been on the market for a month and a half now. Justin has repaired doors and windows, painted the inside and had the siding power-washed. He has kept the grass mowed and the bushes trimmed. He has overseen the repairs to the plumbing and has even put a fresh coat of paint on the carhouse—a fool's errand, Georgia thinks, the way old wood drinks paint, but it will look good for long enough, until some other fool buys the house, the outbuildings, and the few dozen acres around it.

She hadn't meant to come herself, other than for a necessary weekend or two. But, as she told Cathy Rayner while she packed up the smallest U-Haul trailer she could rent from the Amoco station two blocks away from her brick rancher, you never know.

“Never know what?” Cathy said. She had been trying for days to talk Georgia out of doing “anything rash.” She had warned her of decisions made in grief and haste.

“Anything,” Georgia had told her. “You never know anything.”

The SUV to which the trailer was hitched was a high-riding monster whose driver and passengers were so far off the ground that it made Georgia feel mildly dizzy sometimes. She had never liked it and should have sold it already, but it was Phil's when she first met him. He had loved it, even if the roughest obstacle it had to muscle over was the speed bump in the grocery-store parking lot.

Georgia backed out onto the cul-de-sac, waved once to Cathy, who was shaking her head as she waved back, and she was gone.

What the hell, she wondered before she came to the first stop sign, am I doing?

The first Thursday in October, she had awakened at 5:15 from a dream so real that it would rub against her all day. She tried to go back to sleep, but after half an hour, she knew it was hopeless.

She had gone back to sleeping in the king-size bed they had shared, and now she thrashed around on it, lost in alien territory, sometimes opening her eyes to find she had drifted 90 degrees or more from where she began the night before.

The dream was about Phil and her. She was trying to save him, somehow, jumping from the telephone to his prone body to the phone again. He was saying something, but she couldn't remember the words later. Finally, she was running, trying to scream for help. But her legs were like lead and her mouth was silent, and she woke up tired and hopelessly tangled up in the bottom sheet, crying and saying, over and over, “I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”

The dream would stay there on the periphery of her consciousness all day, a ghost always just out of reach.

After she gave up on sleep, she showered and dressed, then made herself some coffee, ate her cereal, and took her vitamins. She was supposed to be working on a book (the official reason for her break from teaching), something on the early, uncollected short stories of J.D. Salinger. By 8 o'clock, though, she knew she could not face a day at the keyboard.

She lay on the living room couch, switching channels 20 times, picking up and putting down three magazines and two books, dozing off twice, and taking a desultory lunch of uncooked wieners and half a large bag of corn chips with chive dip.

She still kept a little marijuana around, a habit as dated as psychedelic album covers and bell-bottoms, she knew, but it made her feel good from time to time. She rolled a sloppy, out-of-practice joint and smoked it all. After that, she spent the rest of the afternoon watching one live-audience television show after another. She ate a dozen of the small chocolate candies that she had bought in anticipation of Halloween.

When she started to come down, just in time for the 5:30 news, she got the blues. She put on a George Winston CD that reminded her of Phil and cold weather, and she burrowed farther into the couch. She felt she could not have moved if the house had been on fire.