The Evidence Against Her (8 page)

“—are the
ruin,
are the
ruin,
the total ruin of my life, my whole life, of everything I know!
Wrecked!
All a shambled
wreck! Wrecked!
”

“Stop . . . Dwight . . . stop . . .”

“. . .
never
helped me,
never
listen to what I
tell
you!”

And each emphasis was accompanied by the unmistakable smack of a blow.

“Stop it . . . don’t don’t don’t . . .” Their mother’s voice muffled finally, and there was the soft falling-to of the kitchen screen, the door slamming as she retreated indoors followed by the clunk of the bolt being thrown and—in a little bit—the rasp of the barn door heaved open. Each child stayed still in bed, frozen with dread, until their father’s automobile sputtered to life and finally couldn’t be heard any longer after it rounded the bend on Newark Road. They found their mother folded angularly into a kitchen chair, with her hair loose and falling forward over her face, which she had lowered into her cupped hands on the table, and they huddled around her, trying to get her back to her bedroom.

“You see . . .” She exhaled in a long, hissing sigh, raising her head like a wraith in her flowing white nightgown. “Just see what kind of husband I have. . . . Look what he does.” She lowered her head again gently into the palms of her hands and wept in long sweeps of expended air and shuddering gasps in an effort to catch her breath, her mouth dark in her pale, shocked face.

Agnes and Howie and Richard and Edson couldn’t help but look; they couldn’t help but see. They were overcome with desperation and embarrassed sorrow and pity, and they were overwhelmed with unspecified shame, as well. But the older children hated their mother a little, too, for her terrible baffled sadness. Only Edson moved forward and attempted to embrace her. “Oh, Mama! Mama! Mama!” he said as he patted her head awkwardly.

Agnes and Howie and Richard hated her in the days that followed for the dark bruises that appeared on her cheek and along her arm where it was exposed beneath her sleeve. In spite of themselves they held her misery against her; it was such thoroughly irrefutable evidence of failure on all their parts, somehow. “Look at this,” their mother would say in apparent bewilderment, raising and turning her arm in surprise. “How could this happen? How could this happen to me?” she would ask her children when she came across them as she wandered though the house after Mrs. Longacre had gone. “Why, look at what your father’s done,” she would say mildly, perplexed herself. The older three would glance away, would refuse to contemplate her lament, but Edson would study his mother in despair and take himself off to his own room, where he flung himself out flat on his bed and wept silently with fury and sadness. Their father was gone for days and days, and Agnes heard Mrs. Longacre say to Edson that sometimes people were bound to get what they deserved.

On the morning of her birthday, though, Catherine was positively jaunty, straightening up, pushing her hair behind her ear. “Oh, I think your father can afford to buy me a few sober dresses . . . a hat with a plain brown velvet band, I think . . . ,” she said in a dreamy, thoughtful voice, putting the shears down on the bench where most of the clothes lay in disarray. “I think that won’t be too much to spend on his old wife.
This
old lady needs some new clothes for her birthday!” And she seemed triumphant, as though she had put one over on somebody. But Edson shivered in misery beside Agnes, and Howie and Richard were behind them looking on.

“Well, don’t you four look like death warmed over?” their mother said, reaching up with both hands to fasten her hair securely, although her wrapper fell open as she raised her arms, revealing the sharp wings of her collarbone, the shadowed hollows of her breastbone, and the tops of her slack breasts. Agnes moved in closer to block her from view, though Catherine took no notice. “But you can just wipe off those gloomy faces. We’re going to have a
wonderful
day! We’re going to have a picnic. Anything we like we’ll take along and nothing,
nothing
we don’t long for with all our hearts! We’re going to make ice cream, too, when we get home.

“Oh, that’s what we always did back home for my birthday! I always asked Ida to make fried chicken and my daddy made his famous ginger ice cream. Mama couldn’t cook to save her life, of course, but she always was just so much fun! We’d go out the Trace to the Indian mounds, and Mama would bring along big sheets of cardboard. We’d use them like sleds. We’d go flying down from the top of those mounds. Just flying down. And they seemed so high to me, but they weren’t at all, you know. She’d settle everyone under the trees, and they always made me take a nap before we had dinner. It almost killed me! Lying there with my eyes closed, listening to everyone laughing and talking.” She was a little brittle with excitement, hurtling through the words and beaming, but then she slowed down and fixed them with a look of mock reproach. “In Natchez, you see, I didn’t have to deal with such a bunch of spoilsports and sourpusses.”

“Mama, you’d better go get dressed,” Agnes said to her mother with discouraging deliberation, and her mother’s expression began to lose its animation. “Mrs. Longacre will be here any minute. We have to get to school, Mama. We can’t go on a picnic today. But we can have fried chicken for dinner if you’ll just tell Mrs. Longacre. And we can make ice cream, too. Hadn’t you better go get dressed?” She spoke kindly enough, but she was no longer cajoling. Her mother made a childish, bitter face at her.

“Hah! Mrs. Longacre makes fried chicken I wouldn’t even feed to a bunch of Yankee soldiers!
Boils
it first! It truly does amaze me! Honestly, it does! These people have no idea how to cook. I tell you, I’ve seen Ida take a couple of handfuls of dandelion greens and a little bacon fat and turn it into the finest . . . oh, well, the most delicate salad you can imagine. But in
this
godforsaken place . . . Ugh! Disgusting!” Then her voice slipped into a tone of supplication. “But you can stay home from school today. You all have my permission. It’s just one day. Just one day.”

“Mama, you know we can’t do that. We’ll miss enough being sick. It’s too hard to catch up. I’ll fix griddle cakes and we have cane syrup, too, that Peggy sent from New Orleans. You get dressed and we’ll have a celebration.”

But as they walked along to school in the crisp air, Edson lagged behind his two older brothers, and Agnes was yards behind him, having stayed on to speak to Mrs. Longacre. Richard and Howie joked with and elbowed each other, walking for a while with each one trying to push the other into the ditch alongside the road while the other strained mightily to keep his balance. The rule between them was that you could try to unbalance the other in any way except tripping or using your hands.

“You two stop it right now,” Agnes called ahead to them, over Edson’s head. “You’ll get wet and have to wear those shoes all day.”

Howie turned around and walked backward for a little while, miming someone about to lose his balance, arms flailing wildly, fingers splayed, pretending to teeter along. “Well, Agnes, if I fall in, maybe I couldn’t go to school at all. Like Mama said. I have her
permission!
Why, I could just go right home and go on Mama’s picnic!”

He stopped still and struck a pose with one hand on his canted hip in ridiculous exaggeration and gestured to Richard with a sweep of his arm, adopting a silly falsetto voice and copying his mother’s Southern accent, the words sliding away before they ended: “Now you just go grab a handful of those cattails and a bucket of lard, and I tell you, Ida’ll make you the daintiest dish you ever
did
see! Don’t you know, Ida could fry up a batch of chicken, and we could all run out and slide down the Indian mounds. Just
fly
down those hills,” he mimicked. “Oh, my, they’re so
tall!
And if I have to take a nap before dinner, why, I’ll just
die!
”

But then he let his voice fall back into its own pitch. “And I think Mama was just about to celebrate her birthday in her birthday
suit!
” And this just knocked them out, he and Richard, it was so scandalous a thing to say—to imagine. They fell against each other in delighted embarrassment and illicit glee. Agnes didn’t reprove them, and Edson studied the ground as he walked, not looking at them but flushed red with repressed laughter and overwhelmed with an ache like homesickness. They were mean, all so mean, to their mother.

Of Catherine’s four children, only Edson, at age ten, still carried in his head on the morning of his mother’s fortieth birthday an image of her remarkable face, the high, wide, rounded brow and long straight nose of a great beauty. He had no idea of comparisons, of judging her against any other person at all. In fact, he didn’t even know that what she looked like had any bearing on his sorrowful recollection of her face. The consequence of apprehending beauty, however, is truly mysterious, and Catherine Claytor was not merely attractive, not just pretty, but powerfully lovely. In the same way that—regardless of circumstance—horses are beautiful and camels not, she possessed beauty out of context.

When she turned her wide, pale, down-slanting eyes on him, or whenever he recalled her happiness and then her eventual closed-down look of resignation—her inevitable surrender to a kind of hopelessness—he forgave her anything and was filled with a powerless protective pity for her. In spite of the moody fury that increasingly
was
the context of his mother’s life, in spite of the terrifying rage she sometimes directed his way, her periods of endearing, heartbreaking optimism, along with beauty of the high order that she possessed, remained for him an extenuating circumstance. The rest of her children had lost faith, lost the ability to see her at all separate from whatever demons had overtaken her.

In good weather the Claytor children walked to school, and the first of October, 1917, in Washburn, Ohio, was a glorious day. Edson was still young enough that it didn’t cross his mind to weigh whatever the weather happened to be compared to what it had been the day before, and his brothers didn’t take much note of the weather either, except in connection to some other event in their lives—outdoor recess, for instance. But Agnes’s spirits lifted in the sparkling day as she rounded the bend and approached the grove of trees beyond which the Claytor place could no longer be seen from the vantage point of Newark Road.

At first just the rhythm of her body moving easily along the familiar road lulled her out of her worry over the marshy quagmire of life at home into a determined musing on the affairs at school, ideas she had for the class book, the news about Lily Butler and Warren Scofield’s visit she was eager to tell Lucille, and a host of questions to ask her in private. She brought the memory of Lily’s quick mind and delighted curiosity firmly into focus, and she realized that the notion of Warren had never been out of her head at all. She allowed herself to see him standing with that apple in his hand, slowly bringing it to his mouth and biting into it.

But she wasn’t far enough away from home yet to be completely free of a little catch of anxiety at the edge of her thoughts. It made her uneasy to think about her mother alone all day with Mrs. Longacre. Agnes no longer assumed that her mother would know to come up with a plausible explanation for her behavior. Agnes wasn’t even sure anymore that her mother realized, as she once had, when her behavior was out of the ordinary. When Agnes had watched from the window for Mrs. Longacre’s approach and contrived to meet her at the door just as they each were passing through, Agnes had pretended that the request she made was a sudden whim, a spur-of-the-moment idea. She had moved across the threshold past Mrs. Longacre and then turned back.

“Oh, Mrs. Longacre? I just thought! Do you think you might have any time at all today . . . Well, it’s my mother’s birthday, you know. Of course we won’t celebrate or anything until my father’s home on Saturday.” She infused her voice with the casual, confident certainty of a person aware that she is only politely restating an already known or assumed fact. “But the boys wanted—oh, well, I should say, actually, that
Edson
especially wanted to give Mama the present he bought for her tonight. It’s so hard for him to wait,” she added fondly. “You know how excited he can get! I thought maybe we could do something especially nice, and I was going to make a cake this afternoon. But,” she sighed, “I have to stay late to work on the senior pageant.” She assumed a wide-eyed look of resignation at the unforeseen responsibilities of her own life.

Mrs. Longacre’s granddaughter had been editor of the yearbook when she was a junior at the Linus Gilchrest Institute for Girls, and editor of the class book her senior year. The girls at school still talked about Bernice Dameron with admiration, and Mrs. Longacre looked back at Agnes with a succinct little nod of acknowledgment. Agnes pressed on. “I wonder if you might possibly have the time to make a cake? Oh, just any kind that’s easiest. Not even any frosting. It’s such trouble, I know. I’ll just sift some sugar over the top. I should have done it last night, but I was determined to help my mother get her clothes sorted out before Cleo Rutledge comes to let down my hems. And, my goodness! We certainly didn’t finish. Please don’t bother about all the things we’ve got spread all over the place in the pantry,” she said in a sort of breathless, dismissive rush. “But it would be awfully nice to have a cake to cut after supper tonight. Do you think . . .”

“Oh, yes, yes,” Mrs. Longacre said, to hurry her on, standing turned to listen while she impatiently removed her gloves and coat and hat. “I don’t see why I can’t do that.” And Agnes beamed at her.

“It’s awfully nice of you, Mrs. Longacre. Edson will be so glad! We’ll
all
be glad! But Edson was so disappointed.”

Agnes decided she had done all she could, and as she walked along Newark Road, farther and farther from home, she fell into a pleasant anticipation of where she was going as opposed to where she was coming from. But she felt traitorous, too, in her slow accretion of pleasure and her metamorphosis, during that forty-five-minute walk to school, into a seemingly untroubled, assured, and capable young woman who was, as it happened, one of the stars of the Linus Gilchrest Institute for Girls, class of 1918. Nevertheless, she walked along growing increasingly happy on this particular morning as the billowing pure white clouds moved fast through the bright sky, casting flying shadows over the tall grass in the meadows soon to be mown for hay.