Rock of Ages (20 page)

“Maybe I ought to just shut up and let that fat piece of shit get away with it,” Georgia said, tears welling up.

He told her, pinning her with his fierce eyes, that if he truly believed Pooh Blackwell had murdered Jenny, he'd be at the head of the lynch mob.

“I think the Blackwells did what the Blackwells have always done,” he said, looking out across his land. “They saw a way to steal something within the bounds of the law, and they did. I do find it hard to believe they just flat-out killed her.

“If they take it over the edge, you know I'm there. But I've got to live here, Georgia, right here, night and day. I can't be playing Columbo, chasing wild-ass theories around, making enemies out of everybody. I don't like carrying a loaded gun with me.”

Neither, Georgia told him, do I.

Now, she doesn't know what to say. She is starting to doubt her own convictions. She knows it would be easier to just let it go. She knows she has always had trouble letting things go. Her analyst told her that, as did her first and third husbands.

The diamond ring, if it was on her hand that day, could have been stolen by any of several individuals in the employ of the sheriff's department, the fire department, the funeral home—God knows who else. The shoe could have been dragged there by a dog after it washed up on the bank of the pond, or it could have come from some other place and time entirely. They might one day drain Harold McLaurin's snake pond and find a single, sensible shoe in the muck at the bottom, where it sank after it left Jenny's thrashing foot.

Anything was possible. Her answer was but one of several theories, and far from the most straightforward and likely.

“I haven't tried again to talk to Pooh,” she tells Kenny. “I don't know what to do about all that. I guess I just wish it would all go away. I'm sorry I got you into it.”

“I'm here, watching your back.”

As he says this, he puts his right hand on the nape of her neck and rubs it. She leans into him. She turns at the same time he does, and they are wrapped in their second long, wet embrace of the week, their tongues deep in each other's mouths. He pulls her away from the window, out of view of the recliner and Forsythia Crumpler. His hands are squeezing her bottom, and she is reaching for the zipper of his jeans. He grabs her hand and shakes his head. She nods hers but backs away. Neither of them says a word as they return to the dishes.

They are almost finished when they see Tommy come running from the woods, looking frightened. Justin, walking fast and calling after him from 20 yards behind, also looks shaken.

Tommy doesn't say a word, just runs to his father and puts his arms around his waist, burying his head in his stomach.

“What?” Kenny says, as Justin opens the screen door and stands there, looking as if he wants to hit someone.

“The cat,” Justin says. “The goddamn cat. Nails. Jesus.”

There had always been cats around the farmhouse, feral creatures living on the periphery, earning their keep by thinning out the rats and mice. Whatever humans were living there would feed them, leaving table scraps and water at the edge of the yard. No cat ever was allowed inside a house. Georgia was 24 before she realized she was allergic to them; she had not been in a culture until that time that regularly allowed them indoors.

Occasionally, a younger family member would try to tame one of them, with mixed results. Georgia herself can remember a tabby kitten she once took in, when she was 10. It had been abandoned by its mother, and Littlejohn and Sarah let the kitten stay on the porch in the house they were living in, next door. Georgia could carry it around in her arms, as long as there were no dogs around. It was the only one of the woods cats in decades to have a name: Ginger.

Ginger reached adulthood and left one day, never to return except for meals. Georgia tried for weeks to coax the animal back in from the hubcap holding the cats' food, but it would never let her or another human come within 20 feet of it again.

Leeza had always lived among cats. When she saw the half-dozen or so that frequented the farm—fed now mostly by Kenny—she wanted one of them for a pet. Justin didn't remember that much about the farm, but he did remember the cats. He remembered picking one of the more careless ones up when he was 6 or 7 and getting scratched badly enough to require a rather painful shot.

They're wild, he told Leeza. They won't even let you get near them.

We'll see, she said.

She would wander out in the yard, into the fields and woods, sometimes carrying food with her, sometimes not. She would be gone for two hours or more, long enough to worry Justin.

Within a week, one of the cats, another tabby, barely more than a kitten, was following her back to the yard. Leeza would lower herself awkwardly to the ground and sit cross-legged, talking to the animal, and it would sit, not 10 feet away, watching her. Then it was 8 feet, then 5.

Two weeks after Justin told her the cats were wild, she was able to pet one of them. She would walk along with the cat rubbing against her legs. Justin worried that it would cause her to trip and fall.

She named the cat Nails, because of its scruffy, street-wise demeanor, and she has been feeding it separately from the others, sitting on the brick back steps. Sometimes, the cat would sit beside her, both of them looking out at the fields and woods, the other cats staring back at them from across the yard.

“Just don't let them in the house,” Georgia said, the first time she saw this wonder for herself. Leeza never did, although with the weather getting colder, Georgia has figured it's only a matter of time. She knows from personal experience that a woman eight months pregnant can get about anything she wants.

Kenny leaves Tommy with Forsythia Crumpler, who has been roused from her nap by the commotion. Tommy wants to come with him, but when his father tells him to stay with Mrs. Crumpler, he obeys him. Kenny and Justin don't want Georgia to come with them, either, but she insists.

The cat is at the old tobacco barn, hanging by a cord from a hook over the door, its tongue sticking out like something from some sadistic cartoon, its legs dangling from its body, looking much smaller than it did when it was alive.

Kenny walks around the old farm every day or two. Even though the barn is on Blue and Annabelle's land, it's part of his route as well. He walked by here yesterday morning.

They huddle and devise a plan. If they can get back to the house before Leeza gets up from her nap, and if they can get Tommy out of the house, they might be able to tell her that the cat ran off, disappeared, turned wild, whatever. There is a precedent, Georgia tells them. It seems cruel, but less cruel than having to tell a woman eight months pregnant that somebody has gone to the trouble to hang her pet cat.

“Maybe,” Justin says, “after the baby is born.”

Justin goes to get a shovel, and Kenny and Georgia return to the house before Leeza awakens. Kenny takes Tommy home. The boy is sitting, watching television with Forsythia, when they return, sharing the recliner. She has her arm around him. He has his thumb in his mouth.

“I'm sorry,” Georgia says as they both leave.

“Maybe it's some of the Armstrongs' kids,” Kenny says. “This would be about their level of sorriness.”

One look tells Georgia how little he believes this.

Justin is back in half an hour, just as Leeza is getting settled in the den, apologizing for being “so lazy,” wondering where everyone has gone.

“Has anyone fed the cats? And Nails?” she asks, and they're silent for a couple of seconds.

Finally, Justin says he did.

“I just left some food for all of them in the hubcap out back. Nails got his share too,” he tells her. Still waking up, she nods her head and smiles.

Georgia takes Forsythia home. They don't talk much about the cat, and they both tell each other to be careful. It seems to be their mantra these days.

When Forsythia makes no effort to get out of the car and go inside, Georgia starts to ask her if anything is wrong.

“I don't know why I'm telling you this,” the old lady says. “But something's got me thinking about it today. Maybe it's Leeza and her baby.”

Her lower lip is trembling. Georgia puts her hand on Forsythia's and listens.

Forsythia McDonald grew up in a family that was almost wealthy by Port Campbell standards. She would be the only girl in her class to go on to college.

James Gilley was the son of the town's police chief, a wild, handsome boy.

“I just loved him to death,” Forsythia says, clutching a handkerchief.

They were 16, seniors three months from graduation, when Forsythia knew she was pregnant and had been for at least two months.

“We could have gotten married. It would have been a disaster, though, and I'm sure James Gilley didn't want to, not really. Nobody knew what to do. It was an awful time, and it should have been so grand, with graduation coming, and then college.

“Everyone was just so ashamed of me. They talk now about boys taking their share of the responsibility when something like that happens. That wasn't the way it was back then.”

The chief sent his son away to live with relatives in Greensboro. Forsythia McDonald's parents sent her away, too, to Evergreen.

“It was a place for ‘bad' girls like me. It was like a prison. I was able to graduate from high school there, among other girls waiting to have their babies, too. I was so scared. My parents came to see me twice the whole time, and it was only 60 miles away.”

The baby was born in early September.

“I saw her just once, and I wish I'd never seen her at all. They wouldn't even let me touch her. I can see her face right now.”

The adoptive parents took her away, and Forsythia came home later that month, to a household that never truly forgave but insisted on forgetting.

“We never mentioned it again, ever. The next year I started college, a year late, and I suppose, considering the times, I'm lucky they didn't just disown me or something. Everybody in Port Campbell knew about it, of course. You couldn't keep something like that a secret.

“They treated me like I was lucky, lucky to still have a life in front of me, not condemned to carrying some bastard child around like a mark of shame. But all I could feel was emptiness.”

She went on to graduate with honors from the women's college in Greensboro, driven by a determination to erase the stain. Two years after she came back to Scots County to teach, she met and soon married Whit Crumpler, a prosperous farmer who adored her. He was a plain man in intellect and appearance.

She would see James Gilley from time to time, here and there, but he seemed to want to avoid her, and he eventually moved away for good.

“I never did right by Whit,” she says, looking across the barren fields. “He seemed to worship me, but I never got over the loss—the losses, really. In spite of everything James Gilley did or didn't do, I never really got over him.

“But the baby. Oh, Lord, how many times have I wondered whatever happened to her? They had a fire at Evergreen some years back that destroyed all their records, and you couldn't find her now even if you wanted to.”

Forsythia and Whit Crumpler never had children.

“I can go for a day sometimes without thinking about her, but that's about it. I even gave her a name, in my mind. Geneva. Sometimes, I talk to her. Isn't that silly?”

“No. That's not the least bit silly. Does anyone else know—I mean, I've never heard anyone saying anything—” Georgia struggles to find the words.

“Oh, they must know, or at least the ones in my generation do, even out here in East Geddie. But they don't talk about it. I suppose they afford me that courtesy. But they know.”

“Well,” Georgia says, “anyone who doesn't know will never know from me.”

Forsythia pats her on her knee.

“That's why I told you, I guess.”

Georgia has been home half an hour when the phone rings.

When she answers, there is no response for two or three seconds, and she thinks at first that the telemarketers are even working on national holidays. Then, just as she starts to put the receiver back, she hears the voice, low but distinct.

“Happy Thanksgiving, bitch. Sorry about your cat.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

November 28

Georgia finds herself daydreaming in the mostly empty sanctuary. She wonders if this is part of what she is supposed to get out of organized religion—a small patch of peace that might carry outside the walls of the church. Like yoga, without all that twisting and bending.

The last three days have not been in the least peaceful.

She and Justin have both spent an inordinate amount of time looking for a nonexistent cat. Georgia would walk through the fields, within earshot of Leeza, calling, “Here, kitty, kitty. Here, Nails. Come here, boy,” and feeling like an utter fool.

She asked her son if he didn't think it would be better just to tell Leeza about the cat's demise, but he told her he didn't think so, that he just didn't want to deal with that kind of drama right now.

Someday, he told her, we'll all laugh about this.

God knows, Georgia thinks, there is drama enough already. She has no doubt as to whose voice she heard on the phone Thanksgiving night. She hasn't told anyone except Kenny about it. When she told him, on Friday, he said it sounded about right.

She wondered if they shouldn't go to the sheriff, and realized how fruitless that would be even as she suggested it.

“I know you'd like to go over there and shoot his nuts off,” Kenny told her. “It's going to take a little patience, though. We're going to have to have some kind of evidence.”

“With the quality of local law enforcement,” Georgia said, “he's probably going to have to make a confession in the middle of High Street and have it notarized. I don't know if that would do it.”