Summer in the South (36 page)

“Thank God.” She made a comical face. She folded one leg under her and sank down on the bed. He walked over to the window and stood looking out with his hands clasped behind his back.

“He misses you, Will. You and Fanny and Josephine. I think he’s lonely for all of you but he doesn’t know how to make it right. Maybe you could see him. Put it all behind you once and for all, because I do think he’s sorry.”

He didn’t turn around. “We’ll see,” he said quietly.

T
hey went into the kitchen and made sandwiches, then took them out on the verandah to eat. The sky had begun to darken. Several fierce gusts of wind rattled the windows. It was the way August was down here. Blue skies in the morning and rain every afternoon.

They sat in two rocking chairs with their plates and glasses resting on a small round table between them.

Will gazed across the lawn, his feet tapping lightly against the floor-boards. “I want you to know that whatever happens, we’ll still be friends.”

“I’m glad,” she said. The rain began, falling softly. “Do you think Josephine and Fanny and Clara will feel the same way?”

“Well,” he said, chewing thoughtfully. “You might want to wait until they’re dead to publish.”

“Yeah. I thought about that.” And it was true, she had thought about putting the manuscript away in a drawer and taking it out later to see it with fresh eyes. To see if it was still as good as she thought it was.

“Of course, that’s just an idea,” he said. “It’s a fine story. A damn fine story about a Colorado cattle baron and his violent offspring. It’s got it all: greed, love, murder, even a vengeful family ghost.” He grinned at her and she smiled gratefully. “You’ve got it wrong though, about Clara and Josephine.”

“You don’t think they killed Charlie?”

“Neither one is capable of that.”

The rain began to fall more forcefully, drumming along the roof and gutters. They sat quietly rocking, listening to its melancholy music.

He said, “You’ve also given Josephine a lover in your story, which is pretty far-fetched.”

“Is it? She was an attractive woman, and she never married. Alice says it was the family disgrace of Fanny’s elopement that kept her from marrying. I imagined her being in love, and I imagined Charlie putting an end to the affair just by his presence in the house. Certainly Josephine hated Charlie. You can see that in her diary.”

“Well, in your story that’s fine. But in reality I don’t believe it ever happened. And another thing,” he said. “I don’t for one moment think my great-grandfather James meant to give Longford to Charlie Woodburn. How did you come up with that?”

She told him about the journal entry and the letter Rachel Rowe had found.

“So you’re saying that if Josephine had not ignored her father’s wishes, if she had not ordered the deed destroyed, then Longford would belong to Jake today and not to me?”

Ava said nothing, staring out at the rain.

“I don’t believe it,” he said.

She got up, went into the house, and came back out with Josephine’s diary and a file folder filled with letters and documents Rachel had found. She set them down on the table between them.

“This material is yours. Do with it what you want,” she said. “I’ve told my story. I’ve made all the pieces fit. The historical truth doesn’t matter. No one will ever know what really happened to Charlie Woodburn.”

A sudden blast of wind swept the porch, jangling the chains of the porch swing. Shivering, Ava rose and went to fetch a sweater.

On the threshold of her room, she stopped and stood, very still, staring. The pages of her manuscript lay scattered across the bed and floor as if tossed by vengeful hands. Thinking the wind might have blown them, she walked stiffly across the room to the windows, but pulling back the shutters she was startled by her pale, frightened reflection in the glass. A shiver of fear and trembling possibility rose up her spine.

The windows, she saw, were tightly latched.

1931

Woodburn, Tennessee

Pain was part of love.

Fanny had learned that all those years ago watching Papa suffer following Mother’s death. She had learned it blindly following Josephine. And she had learned it, too, married to Charlie Woodburn, had learned to take his anger and sorrow into her own body as she did the Eucharist, to submit gracefully to the terrible fury of his despair. He knew of the suffering quality of love, too. She had heard him cry out for his dead mother at night, his hair dark against the pillow, his face in sleep so boyish and innocent, and she had comforted him, holding him to her breast until he woke and, in disgust, pushed her away.

She had seen that same suffering in his face as he watched his son, King, toddling on crooked legs across the verandah, pulling himself up by grasping his father’s trousers in his tight little fists. How tender Charlie’s face became when he looked at King! And he would feel the same way about their own son, too. She put her hands there now and felt the child move, trailing one tiny foot across her swollen belly.

Her own poor child who would never know his father. Fanny knew this now. She had dreamed it the other night. Papa had come to her in her dreams, holding a bowl of spiky fruit in his hands.

It was sad, of course, but inevitable. Some things are not meant to be.

Was it only two days ago that Charlie had climbed the stairs after his fight with Josephine in the kitchen? It seemed a lifetime ago. Fanny had been sleeping but had heard his footsteps on the stairs, waking with a start and preparing herself for the inevitable. Their voices, raised in anger, had been part of her dreams, and that’s how she knew that they’d been quarrelling, that’s how she knew Charlie would come seeking retribution.

She was unprepared for the depth of his anger, and as he stepped into the room and she saw his face, she put her hands instinctively to her belly. He crossed in several quick strides, and Tom Penny, on the pillow beside her, arched his back and hissed. He leaned down and picked up the cat by the scruff of the neck, and Fanny, frantic now, rose and began to claw at his face. Surprised, he looked down at her and laughed. It was at that moment that Tom Penny turned and sank his teeth and claws into Charlie’s arm, and with a shouted oath, Charlie flung the cat against the wall. It hit with a sound like a ripe melon breaking. Fanny leapt up and ran to Tom Penny, kneeling and cradling his broken body in her arms, and Charlie, surprised by her tears, stood for a moment, breathing heavily.

Then, without a word, he turned and left the room.

She buried him in the garden where she had buried the other Tom Pennys, six neat little graves in a row. Then she took her shears and her gloves and her basket and went to the corner of the old stable, where she knelt and picked several spiky balls from the castor bean plants. She went inside the stable, plucked out the seeds, cut them into small pieces with her shears, and put them in a bowl, careful not to get any on her skin, and when she’d finished she took the bowl into the house. She could hear Charlie in his room, moving around. She could hear the clinking of bottles, and she went to the stove and scrambled bacon and eggs in a big frying pan. She put the eggs on a plate and mixed in the tiny seed pieces, then crumbled the bacon on top the way he liked it.

She called to him to come for breakfast. They were alone in the house, just the two of them. He sat down and began to eat, and when he had finished, Fanny took the plate and fork out and buried them with the gloves and the shears behind the stable, just like she had seen Papa and John do with the rats all those years ago.

The following day he was too sick to rise. Fanny offered to make him some broth and he said weakly, “You do it. I don’t trust that sister of yours.” And she went into the kitchen, and when the broth had cooled she dropped in pieces of the seeds and took it in to him, sitting beside the bed and feeding him carefully.

Josephine came in and said, “Should we call the doctor?” and Fanny said, “No, he’ll be all right. He has a sensitive stomach is all.”

“From all the drinking, no doubt.”

“No doubt.”

“Our reading club meets tonight.”

“You go,” Fanny said. “I’ll look after him.”

By evening he’d be gun to hallucinate, thrashing about in the bed, and when Fanny went in to him there was blood on his pillow and on the sheets. She cleaned him up and changed the sheets, then went out into the garden to bury the spoon and the bowl she’d used to feed him the broth. When she came back into the kitchen, he was standing there, fresh blood trickling down the corner of his mouth onto his nightshirt. The kitchen was dark but for a slash of moonlight coming in the long windows. Faintly in the distance, a gramophone played “Boléro.”

“Mama?” he said, weaving on his feet.

He fell onto the floor and lay staring up at the ceiling, blood bubbling on his lips. “I’m sorry,” he said.

She wiped his mouth with the hem of her dress. “I know,” she said gently.

Deep within the house she could hear the muffled chiming of the clock.

He was too heavy to move, and she sat for a long time waiting for Josephine to come home and help her. She must have dozed, awakening to footsteps coming up the front porch, then down the hallway, and she thought,
Those are too heavy for Josephine.
And then she thought,
Papa
?

“Fanny?” Light flooded the room and Maitland stood in the doorway. “Oh, my God,” he said, bending down to where Fanny sat, blinking, with Charlie’s head in her swollen lap. “What happened?”

She told him. Everything. When she had finished, he rose without a word and went into Charlie’s bedroom to get his clothes. He dressed Charlie, then wrapped him in a quilt, dragging him out the kitchen door while Fanny pulled the car around.

The moon had risen high in the sky by the time they got to the river. Maitland switched off the lights of the car and they coasted across the narrow bridge. The water was dark and foamy. Several large boulders gleamed in the moonlight, and there was no sound but the rushing of the water and the wind moaning in the trees.

Maitland poured whiskey from a flask all over Charlie’s clothes and into his mouth and jammed the empty flask into Charlie’s pocket. Then he pushed him over the edge, the quilt unfurling from the bridge like a flag. He stood for a moment, looking down, then bundled the quilt in his arms and went back to the car.

Fanny stood at the railing looking down at Charlie, who had landed faceup in the river and was beginning to float, partially submerged, with the current, his face, in the moonlight, pale and waxy as some monstrous exotic flower.

About the Author

C
ATHY
H
OLTON
, the author of
Beach Trip, The Secret Lives of the Kudzu Debutantes
, and
Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes
, was born in Lakeland, Florida, and grew up in college towns in the South and the Midwest. She attended Oklahoma State University and Michigan State University where she studied creative writing. She lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with her husband and their three children.