Sweet Everlasting (32 page)

Tyler felt the accusing, ice-cold glares of every man in the room. His character had plummeted in their eyes, and no belated betrothal announcement was going to change that. But all he cared about now was getting Carrie out. When he took her hand, she started in surprise. He felt another surge of irritation. Did she think the charade could go on? Did she really think anyone had
believed
her? Her simplicity wrung his heart, at the same time it made him want to shake her.

Out in the dim vestibule, he said, “Wait here for a second, Carrie. Don’t go outside without me.” She nodded readily, but he hoped his precaution wasn’t necessary. It was after ten o’clock; surely the last of the gawkers had dispersed by now.

“Frank?”

Odell stopped in front of him. “This is a hell of a thing, Tyler,” he said in a grim, low-pitched voice. “A
hell
of a thing.”

“I’m aware of that. Is it all right if Carrie stays at your house tonight?”

“Of course it’s all right. Damn it, if she’d stayed with us in the first—”

“Thank you. I think we should go now.” With Frank trailing behind, he went back for Carrie. “You’ll be staying with the Odells tonight,” he told her. She looked startled, but he gave her no chance to respond. Taking her arm again, he guided her out the door, with Frank on her other side.

Miraculously, the street was empty. Even Broom seemed to have disappeared; if he was lurking somewhere, Tyler couldn’t see him. All the way down Broad Street to Truitt Avenue, nobody said a word. But when they reached the Odells’ small, clapboard-sided house, Ty said tersely, “Frank, would you mind giving me a minute alone with Carrie?”

He looked more uncomfortable than angry now. “Sure,” he muttered. “Sure, go ahead.” With an awkward salute, he turned and trotted up his porch steps.

Frank was barely through the front door when Carrie reached for Ty. “I wish I could stay with
you
,” she began, but he cut her off by unwinding her arms and leading her away from the dim pool of light the street lamp cast and into the blackness beside the privet hedge.

“Carrie—”

“Hold me,” she whispered.

This wasn’t part of the plan; he had to keep his head now. But when he felt how hard she was trembling, he gathered her up and held her fast. “Darling,” he heard himself call her, “are you crying? It’s all right, don’t cry anymore. It’s over now, it’s all right.”

“I know, I
am
all right, I just need—this—”

He let her cry. Her angular, thin-boned body had never felt so fragile before. She wasn’t hysterical, and her weeping was more exhausted than despairing; but there was something desperate in the feel of her and in the shaky tension of her embrace. He thought of what she’d been through in the last three days, and wondered if she would break down now. But even as he thought it, he could feel her calming. At length she stopped weeping and began snuffling.

“How long were you locked up?” he asked, while she whiffled and blew into his handkerchief.

“Not long. They weren’t cruel to me. But they thought I killed him, and that was the worst. I found him, his—corpse.” She went stiff and began to shudder. “They never found his gun. They thought I shot him and hid it in the woods. I’ll never—” She choked and started to cry again. “I’ll never be able to forget how he looked, Ty. Oh God, I wish I could go home with you! But I can’t.” But a half-second later, she whispered, “Can I?”

“No,” he said gently. “Carrie, why didn’t you tell them the truth?” What he wanted to say was,
How long would you have held out, till they hanged you ?

“I
couldn’t,”
she retorted, with a sudden hint of spirit. “And you shouldn’t have, either. In a way, it’s lucky that you’re going away now, because people are going to think badly of you. You don’t understand what it’s like here,” she explained patiently, wiping her eyes again. “You’re admired and respected, you’re a
hero.
But they’ll think less of you now that they know you’ve been with me … You know,
been
with me.” That was the best she could do. “Because I’m not respectable, Ty. I’m common. And even though—”

He shut her up with a rough hug. He felt numb and humbled, realizing all at once that she’d lied for the sake of
his
reputation, not hers!

“Carrie, Carrie,” he breathed into the air over her shoulder. “What am I going to do with you?” But of course, he already knew.

Releasing her, he kept her hands and bent close, wishing the light were brighter so he could see her face. “Listen to me, love. There’s no hope of any of this staying a secret. I had to tell Butts the truth, not that gallant lie you made up to protect me.” Which I tried on him first, he added to himself, with no better success.

“Oh.” She sounded dismayed but not surprised. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know what you’d said. You told me to tell the truth, but I couldn’t be sure how much you’d already told them yourself. So—that means they didn’t believe me?”

“Not for a second.”

“Well, I didn’t think so, either. Nobody said anything, but I—had a feeling.”

He decided against letting her in on the general consensus that she was the most dismal and inept liar anyone had ever met. “The whole town’s bound to know everything within a few days, I’m afraid,” he said.

“Oh, by tomorrow, I think.”

She sounded reconciled to it, and she was probably right; she knew the town better than he did. He squeezed her hands tighter. “So there’s only one thing to do. We’ll get married.”

She was shocked into silence for a full ten seconds. “We’ll what?” she got out, on something between a laugh and a gasp.

“Dr. Perry arrives tomorrow, the last I heard. I can have my affairs settled within a week, and then we can leave. We’ll marry in Philadelphia, or”—it just occurred to him—“or here, if you’d rather, it doesn’t matter to me. You’ll stay with my mother and sister while I’m in Cuba. I wish I could tell you how long that will be, but I can’t. It could be a month, six months, a year—I just don’t know. I’m not sure where we’ll live afterward, either—Washington or Philadelphia, maybe Baltimore. But it’ll have to be a city, Carrie, if I’m to do my work. I’m sorry, I know the country suits you better, and I know it’s not what you’d have chosen. But we’ll find a quiet place, and it won’t be so bad, I promise.”

He paused to let her speak. She didn’t. “Well?” he prodded, trying for a lighthearted tone. “Aren’t you going to say something? I’ve never proposed to anyone before. If I didn’t do it very elegantly, there’s inexperience to blame. Carrie?”

She drew her hands out of his. “You do me a great honor, Ty,” she said with husky formality. “I thank you for it with all my heart. My answer is no, but I’ll never forget that you asked me. And it’ll be the happiest memory of my life.”

She’d whispered the last words, as if she were crying again. “Wait,” he said. She was moving back, away from him.

Behind her, a widening rectangle of light in the doorway silhouetted the diminutively pregnant figure of Eppy Odell. “Carrie, will you come in now, please?” she called out in a high, emotional, tightly angry voice. “Dr. Wilkes, will you say good night to Carrie now, please?”

He ground his teeth and uttered an oath. “Wait, Carrie. Listen to me, don’t say no like that. Think, what else can we do? I can’t leave you like this, to suffer the town’s disapprobation by yourself. It might not be the life either of us had in mind, but things are different now, the circumstances—”

“Does ‘disappprobation’ mean disapproval?” she interrupted, soft-voiced.

“What? Yes. The circum—”

“Then it doesn’t matter, Ty. I’ve lived with disapprobation for years and years, and I’m not afraid of it. Don’t worry about me,
please
don’t.” Her voice got fainter as she moved back. “I have to go inside now. It’s not good for Eppy and her family for us to be together like this. I didn’t think of that before.” She drifted farther away.

“Wait,” he said for the third time. “Damn it, Carrie, we have to talk!”

“We can’t. Let me go, Ty. Thank you, but I decline your proposal. Good night!”

She turned and fled, leaving him alone in the dark with his sadness, and his shame-faced relief.

C
ARRIE STAYED WITH THE
Odells for almost a week, sleeping on a folding cot in what had been the pantry but was now Charlotte and Emily’s tiny first-floor bedroom. She never went out, except to weed Eppy’s vegetable garden or cut flowers for the house, so if there was “disapprobation” toward her in the town, it never touched her directly. She felt it, though, and from an unexpected source: Eppy herself. Her friend of five years, her only female friend, couldn’t hide how much she disapproved of what Carrie had done, even though she tried.

“I’ll leave,” Carrie had offered on the day after her arrest and release from jail, when it was already clear to her that her presence made Eppy uncomfortable.

“Where will you go?” she’d snapped. “You can’t go home, there’s a murderer on the loose. If you go to Doc Stoneman’s and stay there alone, people will talk worse about you than they already do. You’re stuck here, Carrie, and that’s that.”

So she tried to make herself useful around the house, taking care of little Fanny, playing for endless hours with the older girls, cleaning, making breads and cookies and great pots of beans—all the while trying her best to stay out of Eppy’s way.

True to his word, the sheriff came to see her after two days, and asked her a hundred questions about her stepfather. He particularly wanted to know about Willis Haight. She couldn’t lie, but she dreaded what would happen to all the Haights, Frances and the six children, if Willis got himself arrested. They lived on the edge of ruin every day as it was. Willis didn’t make much money doing whatever it was he did—selling the distilled whiskey he didn’t drink up by himself, from what she could tell—but if that source of income dried up, the family would be truly destitute. Luckily the sheriff asked her about four or five other acquaintances of Artemis, some she’d never heard of. In a way, it was a relief to find out he’d had even more enemies than she’d thought.

Broom visited her every day, sometimes more than once. His solution to her troubles was for her to come and live with him in his house, where they could be a family. Once, lying on her hard cot and listening to the soft breathing of the little girls sleeping nearby, she actually considered doing it. Not for her sake—she didn’t want to live with Broom—but for his. He needed somebody to take care of him. It was a miracle he hadn’t burned down his house yet, or accidentally poisoned himself, or fallen victim to a thousand other disasters he was too simple-minded to avoid. But she guessed she was just too selfish and mean, because she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Now that Artemis was gone, she could help Broom out a lot more, she told herself, in ways her stepfather would never have allowed. She could bring him nutritious meals, for instance, and sew up his raggedy clothes. It wasn’t enough, but it was all she could think of to do right now. Heaven help her, she just didn’t want to be Broom’s mama.

One morning she was out in the front garden, weeding and pinching back the dead blooms of snapdragons and strawflowers in Eppy’s annual border. It was a job she loved, even though it made her homesick for her own wildflowers up on Dreamy. Maybe it was a sound that made her stand up and turn around, shading her eyes with her hand under the brim of her borrowed sunbonnet, but it seemed more like a sensation, a
feeling
that somebody was watching her. She was surprised when she saw that it was Eugene. Not so much because she wasn’t expecting him, but more because of the way he held himself—still and watchful and maybe a little tentative, and the way he didn’t move for a few seconds even though he knew she’d seen him. It took a wave of her hand to get him out of the middle of the street, and a smile to move him through the privet hedges and up the slate walk to where she was standing in the yard.

“Hey, Carrie,” he greeted her, hands in his pockets, swaggering only a little. “How you been? Heard about your pa and all. Guess he finally got what he deserved.”

He couldn’t seem to look at her directly. When she’d look at him, he’d look away; but when
she’d
look away, she could feel him staring hard at her, almost as though he’d never seen her before. She didn’t know exactly how to respond to his remark about Artemis, so she just said, “How’ve you been, Eugene?”

“Fine,” he answered automatically, but now he
really
couldn’t take his eyes off her. “God damn, Carrie,” he whispered. “I heard you could talk now, but I couldn’t hardly believe it. God damn.”

His swearing had always made her cringe a little. “Yes, I can talk now,” she said with a small smile. “But people get used to it fast, I’ve found out. Eppy and Frank, and especially the children—everybody just takes it for granted now.”

“How come you can do it all of a sudden? Must’ve been the shock, huh? Of finding your pa shot and everything. That’s what folks are saying, anyway.”

“I expect that’s what it must’ve been,” she said, running her work gloves through her hands. Strangely enough, nobody had asked her the question straight out yet, not even Eppy; everybody just assumed it was “the shock,” whatever that meant, so she hadn’t even had to try to make up a story.

“So.” Eugene rocked up and down on his toes, one hand in his belt, the other smoothing his mustache. “So they buried Artemis yesterday, I heard. Must’ve been a pretty small funeral.”

Very small, she thought, nodding. Just her and Reverend Coughan, who’d had a hard time finding nice things to say about the deceased. Eppy had been planning to come, just for the company, but the baby’s croup got worse the night before, and she didn’t want to take her outside. All through the short ceremony, Carrie had wondered if Ty would come. But he never had.

“Did your pa hurt you bad, Carrie?”

She looked up in surprise at the genuine concern in Eugene’s tone. “No, not very. He hit me,” she touched her temple unconsciously, “but I’m fine now. Thank you for asking.”

“Damn son of a bitch. I’m not sorry he’s dead. I’m sorry for what he done to you, Carrie.”