The Four Corners Of The Sky (59 page)

Pregnant at the time with Sam, Grandee soon began—as the town put it—“acting up.” But of course, they understood why, after so terrible a loss. She went out alone at night, driving recklessly on winding country roads, while her husband sat waiting for her on the porch. The town thought she was hoping to die but was unable deliberately to drive off the road because of the baby she carried, the girl she would name Samantha Anne.

Once Grandee didn’t come home till dawn and that time the judge, who’d never been known to lose his composure, slapped her. He hadn’t done it before and he never did it again. He was a large, thickly built man and Grandee was small-boned and slender, but her leap at his face knocked him to the floor and her bite mark on his hand didn’t heal for a month.

A year later she tried to pour a pan of boiling water on his face, but only scarred his ear.

Sam knew from an early age that her parents were very unhappy together and that nothing she did made them feel any less so. Jack learned the same lesson. Grandee gave her second son the name she’d given his dead older brother. The name but not the love. Framed baby pictures of the dead Johnny crowded the lid of the grand piano. Johnny’s baby clothes crowded the drawers of the dresser inside the closet of Jack’s room.

By the time Sam reached junior high school, Grandee had briefly gone twice to a hospital for “nervous disorders.” When she scratched an orderly the first time, they strapped her to her bed. When she started pulling out her hair the second time, they gave her sedatives. The pills helped her through the rest of her life.

By the time Jack was a teenager, the town no longer talked much about the fact that Grandee was “troubled.” They had their own troubles, almost everybody did. Those were times when half the country couldn’t get along with the other half. Jack fought more and more violently with his parents, especially after “the Ruthie episode.” Sam tried to repair the rifts. “Why do you care, Sam?” her younger brother would yell at her. “Stop caring. Why do you love them? They never loved you or me or each other. To hell with them.”

But Sam thought there must have been love. She was always searching for photos of her mother and her father to prove it. Photos from some unknown time when they
had
loved each other. She always believed Jack was wrong, that at least far in the past her parents had been deeply in love. One day in her early teens, she’d been seized with the idea that her parents’ happy pictures were hidden away somewhere, maybe inside her mother’s “sitting room” on the top floor, the door of which was kept locked. Sam found the key to this hidden room and opened the door.

She was horrified by what she saw. Every piece of cloth in the room was sewn together with red yarn. A white window curtain was stitched to a blue bedspread. The spread stretched down to a throw rug on the floor and was sewn to it. A silk slip and a bath towel hung together from a curtain that was sewn to a pillow. Everything was sewn tightly, senselessly together with the blood red yarn, like sutures in some awful botched surgery. Unable to breathe, Sam shut the door behind her. She sat on the stairs and finally she wept at the evidence of her mother’s madness until she was wrung dry of tears. The twelve-year-old Jack found her, her head pressed to the stair rail and he tried to make her laugh by doing a crazy dance for her.

Clark told Annie a version of one family story that was incomplete, but he wasn’t to learn that until a few years later.

He told her this much: On Sam’s last Thanksgiving vacation from college she came home early. It had been a hard time for her. Her first love affair had ended with the woman’s calling it quits. Jack and his parents hadn’t spoken since the Ruthie episode. Ruthie had run off. Clark had returned to Vietnam. D. K. Destin had joined the Navy and been shot out of his plane into the China Sea.

The last night of her vacation, Sam drove to downtown Emerald to see a late movie with George Nickerson and his fiancée Kim. While they were inside the Paradise, a terrible storm came squalling over the hills and tore a great oak tree in the Pilgrim’s Rest lawn out by its roots. It lay on its side across the yard, like a giant tangled in a net.

By the time they left the movie house, the storm was over. Sam returned home to find both Jack and her father gone and her father’s car missing. She found their mother sitting on the floor of the living room. Her clothes had blood on them. The framed pictures of Johnny from atop the black grand piano were arranged around her on the floor like candles around a saint.

When Sam asked what had happened, Grandee said only, “Accident.”

Sam took her upstairs, undressed her, put her in the shower, and helped her wash the blood off herself. Grandee went limp, offering no resistance. By the time Sam got her into bed and returned downstairs to call the police, she heard Jack coming in the door. His clothes were wet from the rain and he was red with mud. He told Sam to hang up the phone. She needed to sit down.

He said that a few hours earlier when a friend had dropped him home from the local pool hall, he’d found their mother sitting there on the floor with blood on her clothes, just the way Sam had found her. But Jack had also found a note from their father propped on the hall table. Sam needed to read this note before she decided to call the police. So Sam hung up the phone and opened the envelope he handed her. The letter, on thick paper with the judge’s name engraved at the top, was in her father’s upright stiffly formal handwriting.

Dear Family,

I have come to a conclusion that feels to me irrevocable. Mother and I have quarreled again. I can endure no longer the unhappiness that weighs on me. I hope that you will forgive or at least understand my decision.

Father

The rest of his letter dealt with financial matters.

Finally Jack pulled the letter away from Sam; she just kept petting the piece of paper as if it were alive. He said he had been out all this time looking for their father’s car but had been unable to find it. He figured their dad had driven the car into the river.

Sam called her friend, the new police chief, and told him she feared her father had committed suicide. When he arrived, she showed him the note. He urged her to hope; maybe they’d find her father safe and sound. He agreed that in the meanwhile there was no need to awaken Mrs. Peregrine tonight.

The Emerald police started a search for the judge.

At breakfast the next morning, Grandee appeared not to know that something had happened. She kept asking where her husband was.

The police found ruts on a high bend in River Road, three miles from the house, where the judge’s large sedan had clearly gone off the road into the Aquene River. They began dredging for the car. Questioned on the local news, the chief spoke of how bad a storm there had been last night and how strong and fast a current; how, in the same storm, ten miles to the north, two men foolishly trying to scavenge debris from the river had drowned in a dinghy. He reminded the town that he’d told them for years they needed a guardrail on that curve in River Hill Road. He said the judge might have had a fatal accident.

It took a week to find and pull up the car, which had been swept half a mile down the river by the current. It took another week to find Judge Peregrine’s body, which had been sucked out of the driver’s seat. The police chief brought the judge’s wedding ring back to his wife. The chief thought the family shouldn’t view the body, which was—he told D. K.—“a god-awful mess.” The town thought Mrs. Peregrine had very bad luck—first her baby son drowning in her swimming pool and then, twenty years later, her husband drowning in the river. There were a few rumors about suicide, but the rumors faded quickly to other topics.

It was this version of the story Clark told Annie on the hot summer night of her freshman year at Annapolis, when she’d asked him why Sam didn’t talk about her parents. A few years later Jack confessed the truth about the judge’s death to Sam and Sam confessed the truth to Clark as he was recovering from his own car accident. She told no one else.

As Clark lay in the
ICU
, critically injured, Sam had phoned Jack with the sad news that Clark might die. A few weeks later Jack suddenly showed up in Emerald, only a day after Annie had left to return to classes. Clark had survived and was recovering. It was then that Jack told his sister a different version of the story, a confession that he had covered up the evidence that their mother had murdered their father. He said that he’d fabricated their father’s suicide in order to spare Sam the ordeal of her mother’s arrest. He said that he’d found Grandee that night, sitting on the floor with the judge’s bloody head in her lap, his skull broken open. He said that he’d wrapped his father in a rug and carried him to the car. He wrote the suicide note himself, forging his father’s handwriting, and left it on the table in the hall.

He told Sam how, as he drove off with their father’s body to the top of River Road, the car slipped sideways in the smear of mud that switchbacked along the hill above the river. Rain and wind thrashed the black trees. The car skidded onto the shoulder, scraping against scrub brush. He was almost on top of the fallen telephone pole before he spotted it and slammed his foot to the brake. The telephone pole lay tangled in live sparking wires, blocking the road at its sharpest curve above the black river.

He said it was as if the storm was telling him what to do. He pulled the body out of the sedan, rolled it out of the bloody rug and propped it up in the front seat. Then he steered the running car toward the shoulder’s edge, almost sliding off the soft bank, and at the last second, jumped clear. He’d seen it done in the movies.

The roiling red current carried the car along, floating it in the churn like a raft, until he’d nearly despaired that it would ever sink. But finally the river sucked it under.

Carrying the bloody rug, he walked back to Pilgrim’s Rest. The storm scudded away and sullen clouds crept into the sky.

He burned the rug and put the bloody kitchen mallet he’d pulled from his mother’s hand into the dishwasher with the supper dishes.

Judge Peregrine’s funeral was the biggest at St. Mark’s since the funeral of his grandfather, “The Boss.” The judge was buried next to his dead son Johnny. Sam sent out the invitations, cooked the food, and cleaned the house for the reception. Three hundred people attended, including the lieutenant governor.

Jack refused to come to the funeral. Instead he robbed the house and drove off in Grandee’s Mercedes. Sam was left to take care of their mother. It was only after Grandee stabbed Sam in the arm with scissors that she’d been persuaded to have her mother institutionalized. But until Grandee died, Sam went daily to see her, even when, propped like a doll on her bed and fumbling with the wrappers of candy, Grandee had no idea who Sam was.

More than a year passed. One day “out of the blue,” Sam would say, “like Gary Cooper in
Now and Forever,”
Jack returned home with the baby Annie and the airplane he’d named the
King of the Sky
. Grandee was in the hospital at the time, having one of her “episodes,” and her son did not go to see her during his month-long stay.

Years later, when he returned with the seven-year-old Annie, Sam told him their mother was dead, although he hadn’t asked.

Sam took care of Annie until the girl went away to college at Annapolis. Sam tried her best to make sure that Annie had, as far as childhoods go, a happy one.

Clark was standing beside Sam’s bed when she awakened. His white lab coat appeared to her to be billowing, wriggly. A black head with a white topknot peeked out and Teddy barked.

“You can’t bring dogs in here,” Sam mumbled.

Clark spilled Teddy onto the bed. “This is your lucky day, Sam. Your surgery was a total success. Good surgeon, that Sarah Yoelson.”

“I could love that woman.”

Clark advised Sam, “Go for it. As the great Bob Dylan says, ‘Love and only love. It can’t be denied.’ Georgette says Annie’s in love with that Miami cop.”

“Hart. Dan Hart. He’s after Jack. How’s Jack?”

“Jack escaped and probably isn’t even dying anyhow.”

Sam smiled as she fell back asleep with Teddy snuggled beside her. “Jack always exaggerated.”

T
he drive from Puerto Esperanza to Havana was only 112 miles and didn’t take long at the speed at which Raffy’s elderly uncle Oswardo Ramirez drove his (also old) cavernous pink Cadillac coupe de ville. Round-faced, friendly, sweating, Oswardo swerved dangerously as he pointed out landmarks of the glamorous seedy city of Havana. With his rapid speech and flurry of hand motions it was as if he were rushing to finish a tour before his car, spitting and groaning, gave out on him. He hurried them past the Capitol Dome, past the monument of the revolutionary hero José Martí, past the huge stone fortress of Castillo de los Tres Reyes del Morro as fast as the Cadillac could maneuver in the heavy traffic.

Holding his guitar case, Raffy sat silent in the back seat beside Annie. He said too many memories were sweeping over him. He hadn’t driven around Havana since his early teens, for on his one trip with Jack he’d been arrested before even reaching land. All he’d seen of Havana had been the very small view from a jail cell window.

By the time they rattled past the high curved sea wall of the Malecón, Raffy was in tears.

In Habana Viejo, streets changed from asphalt to wine-red cobbled bricks. Lanes curved away under low arches of amber stucco. On either side of the avenues, the tall elegant pastel colonial buildings greeted them like ruined monuments to antiquated and neglected triumphs.

Oswardo took them to the Plaza de Armas, near the hotel into which they’d been told they should register even though they would leave before nightfall. It was across the square from the bank. The long pink sedan rattled to a jiggling stop and let out Oswardo’s passengers—Annie and Dan and Raffy. Annie carried the Queen of the Sea, which lay wrapped at the bottom of a paper shopping bag. The contact person would have an identical shopping bag.