The Blackstone Commentaries (23 page)

Getting a grip on herself, she watched him awhile, and while she watched, she recalled the springtime years before when he had finally asked her if she wanted to see where he lived, that cabin in the meadow high in the mountains. She'd known by then how he loved it. “I'd like to,” she'd said, swallowing her excitement.

So he took her there, and they found themselves talking to each other in a way neither one had to anyone before. He always felt free there, free to be himself, free to dream and believe. Sitting on the edge of the porch, they talked and talked while the sunny afternoon turned to fire over the mountains and violet shadows crept out of the valleys like mist. He talked about Alabama for the first time, and about the wagon mines—though not all of that yet—and about fishing with his uncle up at Muscle Shoals. He talked about his time with the preacher and why he'd stayed on in Blackstone
County. He talked about old Doc Willis, his good friend, who had taught him to use a fly rod, the two of them regularly disappearing into the mountains just to fish. And he told her about Pemberton's suggestion, proposal, temptation—whatever it was—and she saw how deeply it had touched him. He told her that if there were an honorable way, he would like to be sheriff of Blackstone County someday, to restore some fairness and respect not to the office so much as to the people, to make the law resemble once again what he believed it was supposed to be—something applied equally in such a manner that everybody knew it was theirs, that they might trust it. “You can't make it perfect, but you can make it a damn sight better,” he told her.

That Charlie had charisma was already plain as day to a lot of people, but especially to Pemberton, who had been dreaming about a Republican county government a lot longer than Charlie'd been around. All he lacked was a Charlie with his larger-than-life honesty and fearlessness to get things rolling.

All at once, she sensed Charlie was trying to retreat from the talk that had gushed out of him, as though afraid she might violate his trust and dream. Maybe by just telling her, he had violated it already. But she turned away and looked toward Damascus, winking beads of light in the darkness, and waited. She'd never known that patience in herself before.

At long last, he said that on still nights like that one, if he listened, he could hear cars thump across the wooden deck of the bridge spanning the deep gorge at Terpville, where the Creek River tore through. He thought he'd just heard one. “Some nights,” he said quietly, “when the air is just right, I can hear the whistles of the trains rolling down to Damascus. Now, that is the most lonely music I know—it tears me all up, that sense of life rolling past, leaving me behind. I want to be out in it, feeling it.”

She shivered at what he'd said, that depth of heart; there had been no retreat from her after all. Thinking her chilled, he started to rise. “No, Charlie, don't stop talking,” she said, seizing his hand.

Later that night when he stood over her, the glow of the fireplace playing over her body, and said, “You will have to marry me if we do this,” he was way beyond fever, the fire inside him wild.

“I'm a grown woman. I want this, too,” she replied. All she wanted at that moment was to slide her hands down his lean, hard body, to take in
all that courage and fearlessness and need, and she was about to die of frustration.

“No, you will have to marry me.” He'd almost been in tears, dreading having to walk away, but she'd known he would.

All of that she remembered like it had just happened, remembered while watching him eat his food the evening after they bound Pemberton over, eating as though she weren't there. They'd been married over ten years, and no person, nothing, had ever mattered to her the way he did. Her life had never mattered so much. She was so proud of him and what he was trying to do and what he believed in. But now she felt fear as well, sensing a coiled quality she hadn't encountered in him before. Then she knew it was what she'd felt him resisting those first days after the Carver shooting, and what he must have been struggling with ever since, but especially now.

She must have been dreading it. Why else hadn't she admitted it was there? She'd known it in other men, Lord knew, disillusionment and frustration, a fear of hopelessness, or worse, hopelessness itself. She had come across it in bars and beds from Atlanta to Nashville—no one in her family knew the half of what she did in those days, thank you. In all those places with all those men, that coiled quality had been a given, like an intimation of their inevitable defeat and failure. Yet it was something in themselves they never questioned because it had been there unchallenged all their lives, as was the blind, useless, self-destructive rage it could provoke. It was a legacy, she thought, wondering if it was just a Southern thing.

But in those days before Charlie, she'd thought it exciting, too, because it was male and dangerous, because it was unacknowledged and unpredictable, because it could reach out and damage, even destroy, anything around it. Particularly something or someone loved, or at least someone acting warm and soft in a loving way. Like fire, it was beautiful, fascinating and repulsive all at once, and a woman—always on an altar, she had learned, and maybe because of that always on the verge of being held to blame—if she were so inclined, could blow the slightest ember into white flame. Oh, she knew.

But until that evening after Pemberton was bound over, she'd been unable to imagine Charlie being that way, nor her being that way with him. He'd known it, that ugliness in men, and worse. It had made him
leave Alabama and take that job with the preacher and travel from town to town for most of a year wrestling it, crazy with it. It didn't grow quiet until he came to Damascus and met Martin Pemberton, and Martin, no matter what his motives or whatever else you might say about him, unlocked that place where Charlie might not only believe in something but actually try to live that belief and breathe pure air.

She fully understood that it was a man who had confronted the coiled thing in himself she'd seen that first day on the courthouse lawn—blushing and foolish looking in all the power of his office and reputation, in all his physical strength and manhood—a man who would take risks with his soul. That was the man who had stolen her heart. She had realized even then that she could love a man like that because he might love himself, and therefore her.

XXIII

Drusilla

He looked angry when he came home the second night after the hearing. She wasn't doing much better herself. The night before, they'd watched a little TV after dinner, then gone to bed with nothing said about what mattered. She never pushed it but wished she had, particularly after the paper that morning, the Pemberton story smeared all over the front page, and her with a whole day to herself to stew about all that wasn't working between them. And of course recollecting more.

She couldn't stop the memories. Like how from the outset they'd been a team. Because Drusilla had grown up in the county, she knew the people and their particulars, so when Mac made all that fuss after Charlie beat him in the first election, saying he was some kind of Bat Masterson gone bad—like Mac was someone's sainted aunt—it was she who told Charlie to go buy himself a suit and derby and wear it on his next still raid.

But power like that called up enemies, the biggest enemy sometimes oneself. Pretending to be one thing in order to reach a goal, a place of clarity,
and doing things for the sake of that clarity you might not otherwise do, you might soon lose sight of the heart and the clarity itself. Charlie had always been deliberate in his use of violence. You had to get people's attention, especially in Blackstone County. But violence ate at him. Sometimes it was so bad by the time he reached her, he'd be all lathered up and trembling like a badly ridden horse, and he'd talk and talk about those pictures in the paper, all the show he had made dumping liquor, and the people he met and the things he had to do to them. He worked in a violent world where people got shot and died—in Blackstone County, someone nearly every week.

Putting on that suit was like an invitation to violence, he once said.

Her sister Sarah had called around lunchtime that second day and told her for the first time about Rachel and Elmore Willis. Afterward Dru had found herself thinking about Rachel, how even if she'd gotten her smarts from her mother, she'd always been restless, too—the Aunt Drusilla side. Dru wondered if that restlessness would have caught up with Rachel even if David hadn't died.

Then she remembered how she and Charlie got married in the field beside the cabin, she going barefoot, the grass wet and clingy between her toes. She'd worn a long, plain cotton dress that came to her ankles and nothing underneath, so all day she'd felt she was roaming the world naked, feeling beautiful because of it, and clean. Not even Charlie knew until that night. It upset him at first, mostly the surprise, like he'd just learned something else about her that had never occurred to him. It never hurt to keep a man on his toes.

That day, Rachel had made her a garland of wild flowers. David was there, too. A year later, those two got married and Rachel got a job and he left college to go to Vietnam. Charlie loved Rachel, always had, like the uncle he was. No, it was more than that: Rachel was like a daughter to both of them. Drusilla was never able to have children—maybe a consequence of the way she'd treated her body—and had always regretted it. Rachel could talk to Charlie. After David died, she came by a couple nights a week for over a year, and the two of them talked while Dru got supper ready. Dru had loved him for it, because again it showed how open and understanding he could be.

She remembered seeing Elmore for the first time at Doc Willis's
funeral, twenty years old, big and handsome. She had felt those Damascus society women nudging their daughters. “He's so polite,” they said, like being a Yankee and being polite didn't ordinarily mix. “And so well dressed. He says ‘Yes, ma'am' and ‘No, ma'am.' A football player, and planning to go to Yale Law School, too. My, haven't we just about died and gone to heaven!”
Why are people surprised some of those girls grow up feeling like whores
, she'd thought,
when their mothers are pimping for them from the cradle?

Which was one thing she'd never had to worry about. Her mother was the bane of Babylon, religious to the core. Poor Sarah took the brunt of that. Then along came Rachel, hog wild and not about to be tamed by man or God. Surprise!

It was at that same funeral Drusilla met Pemberton. Charlie introduced her, told Pemberton she was his wife, and the face almost dropped off the man. But Pemberton recovered and, standing right there with his wife, who was very pretty and wearing expensive, beautiful clothes and a sad expression, gave Dru the once-over, a look there was no mistaking. She didn't need that sonuvabitch. She didn't need anyone like him anymore. It made her feel like a slab of meat, ugly, and his wife standing right there. “Weren't you a Conley?” he'd asked, suddenly thinking with his head instead of his penis. And when she'd nodded—she didn't dare speak—he'd asked, “You're Sarah Cady's sister?” Then, “By
God
, Charlie, you just married into half of Blackstone County!” Despite it being a funeral, he'd laughed outright.

“At least Pemberton was bound over,” she ventured when she and Charlie sat down at the dinner table that second night after the hearing. “Maybe there's justice in that.”

“You know better, Dru. It's all or nothing,” he said. “If he walks free now, it'll be worse than if he'd never been charged. Granted, they sure didn't see Mary Stacy coming, and that felt real good for about two seconds. Just they won't make that mistake again. If it was me, I'd know my defense now. I gave it to them. That was the other side of the coin of not going to the grand jury for a true bill—I have no more rabbits, unless I get lucky again. I'm supposed to go after this Ronnie Patton now, I suppose, wherever the hell he is. No one seems to know anything about him. And they'll probably insist on a preliminary hearing for him first, to establish the event, as though they don't have a car with holes in it and blown-out
windows and a hurting family. That and maybe even a trial for Patton before they bring Pemberton to trial—just to be fair. If the law has its logic, power does, too. People are even beginning to look at the Carvers like
they're
the troublemakers. Or moneygrubbers, though they haven't asked for a red cent. ‘Poor Doc Pemberton.' Doc, my ass.”

“You used to believe in justice,” she said, alarmed and feeling like he'd hurt her somehow.

“I still do,” he replied, “God knows.” But she didn't hear any passion behind it. Maybe it was just fatigue. But then he reached for her face, and with her cheek in his hand, said, “You were crying last night at the table, weren't you?”

She fought back tears. “We need to talk,” she said. He rose from the table then and walked across the room to a window, where he stood looking out. “Charlie, this Carver mess is tearing us up! You come home depressed, or angry—you think I don't see or feel it? I know it would be okay if we could just talk, but you're not saying anything anymore.”

“Well, it's a goddamn mess,” he said to the window. Then, grudgingly, he muttered something about Skinner tooling around town in a flashy convertible and getting financial credit, like he was settling in for good. “And all for burying a boy alive,” he said. But disgusted as he sounded—at one time he would have shaken his head and just laughed—something else was eating him, she could tell.

“What's really on your mind?”

“J. B. Fisher told me he's been seeing Rachel's car parked out in front of that house Willis rents—at six in the morning the other day.”

“So? I knew something was going on, just I didn't find out it was Elmore until today when I talked to Sarah. Rachel's an adult, and so is Elmore—they can figure out their own lives.” Watching him closely, she added, “Rachel's serious about this, Charlie. She's already brought him home three times. You know it hasn't been easy for her to break free of David, or Frank. And you can imagine how Frank was about her and Martin Pemberton. Sarah likes Elmore a lot, and even Frank's beginning to soften.”