The Risen (6 page)

I've sunk deeper into the chair's soft upholstery. I push against the arms, reposition myself closer to the edge. Go ahead and say it, I tell myself, and do.

“What if they find out she wasn't in that grave alone, Bill?”

“It's not possible,” Bill says, rising from his chair again. “Now you know what happened. Keep quiet about it and in a few days this will be out of the papers.”

“So just go on with my life, like nothing's happened.”

“That shouldn't be hard, Eugene,” my brother says, “since your life involves little more than opening a bottle.”

When I don't respond, Bill picks up an ink pen and taps the desk twice, as if testing the wood's solidity.

“Some people die sooner than others, Eugene,
including our father. You know what Grandfather said to me when I declared premed at Wake Forest? He said, ‘
Bill, my boy
,
once you get your degree you'll know that, had you been at the hospital that day instead of some butcher, you could have saved your own father's life
.' It was a screwed-up thing for that old bastard to say, but it haunts me. I've even dreamed I did the operation and saved Dad.”

Bill pauses but I have no response.

“You don't remember him, our father I mean?”

“Not really.”

“He was a good dad,” Bill says. “I remember this thing he did with me. I liked the smell of his aftershave and once he put his on he'd splash some on my cheeks too. It was a little thing, but he never forgot to do it every morning, even if he was running late.”

“And you're suddenly telling me these things why?” I ask.

“I think about what Grandfather told me, how if I'd been the one operating I could have saved our father.”

“What in the hell are you trying to say?”

“I'm just trying to put what happened in some context.”

“Context,” I say. “That's a nice abstract term.”

“You've always been better with words than me,”
Bill says. “Use whatever ones you want, but here's the thing. Whatever you say or do won't help Ligeia. It won't help her family. Her parents and younger sister are all dead, her uncle and aunt are dead. But think about who else you'll hurt, even if you don't give a damn about me. Leslie, your nephews. And Sarah, her too. And I'm also saying that, brief as it was, I feel I
had
a father, I knew him, and you never had that so, yes, at times I've tried to be more than just a big brother. I've done things the way I thought best for you as well as for me. This is one of them.”

Bill looks at his watch, then nods at the photograph of himself in Haiti.

“I'm going back in September. What I can do is help the living, and that's what I need to do now. I've got an operation I need to prep for. Are we clear about all of this?”

“All of it?” I answer. “No.”

“But enough to keep your mouth shut about it?”

After a few moments I nod.

“Good,” he says.

“Sarah,” I ask. “She still keeps in touch with you. Doesn't she?”

“Yes.”

“She's doing well?”

“Yes.”

“Can you give me her phone number, or e-mail? I could go to the library and use a computer.”

“You know she's asked me not to do that.”

“Could I at least see a photograph?”

“I need to go,” Bill says, but when I ask again, he leans over his computer. After a few clicks, my brother turns the screen so I can see.

I almost don't recognize this young woman, professionally dressed, hair cut short. Then I look at the face more closely, see the slightly snubbed nose she got from her mother, the gray eyes from me, and, of course, the crescent shape above her left brow.

“She's a beautiful young woman,” my brother says.

“Yes,” I answer, because she is.

He clicks to another photograph, this one less formal. Though she is inside, she wears a heavy wool overcoat. Bill clicks and the photograph is replaced by an e-mail.
Dear Uncle Bill, Wanted you to see the coat I bought with the birthday money. Thanks sooo much. Love, Sarah.

“Just her mailing address, Bill,” I ask as he logs off. “She can't mind that.”

He shakes his head.

“Just that,” I say, my voice softening almost to a whisper.

“Give her time, Eugene,” Bill says. “Try to see it from her point of view. Do you know what Sarah remembers most about her weekends growing up? It's the clinking of ice cubes falling into a glass tumbler. She says the sooner it began, the worse the day would be.”

I
drive down I-40 to the Sylva exit but instead of my usual route home I go straight into town. Little has changed since my childhood. Businesses have different owners and different names, and another stoplight has been added, but the buildings themselves are the same. Main Street ends in front of the same grassy hill, atop it the white marble courthouse that looms over the town, the same huge clock on the facade. At night the hill darkens except for the clock face, which brightens the sky like a second moon.

The road makes a
t
. I turn left onto Randolph Lane, park across from the square redbrick building. The shrubbery has been dug up but otherwise the yard is
much the same. Above the awning is the metal shingle that Nebo repainted every spring, retracing the black words
WILLIAM MATNEY M.D.,
then painting the rest white.
BLUE RIDGE BOUTIQUE
the sign says now.

In an interview I once read, a surgeon at the Mayo Clinic said only those with an inherent degree of cruelty chose his profession. After Bill's sophomore year at Wake Forest, Grandfather let my brother do office procedures, ones where glistening steel sutured flesh
. When a surgeon creates a wound, he needs to know how to close it,
he'd told Bill, so as Grandfather watched, Bill stitched flesh ripped open by glass and metal. But there were also opportunities for a scalpel, even in a GP's office. Infections needed to be lanced, lesions removed.

“Watch how good he is with his hands,” Grandfather bragged to the patients. “Have you ever seen better hand-eye coordination? That's why he's such a good ballplayer.”

As I stare at my grandfather's former office, it's easy to believe the Mayo surgeon was right, and that the supposed breach between Grandfather and Bill was not so great after all. An inherited cruelty. The acrid, sterile smells; the bleak white walls and cold linoleum floors; the trays of glistening metal instruments—all
had enhanced a sense of detachment from other people's suffering. But that had not been enough for my grandfather. A single framed print hung in each examination room. One was of Leonardo's anatomical sketch of a disembodied human hand, in the other room the Rembrandt now in Bill's office. As a child I'd found those pictures, as I did Nebo, the source of nightmares. I did not enter the rooms unless coerced. Yet Bill had been drawn here, and when offered the chance to cut and stitch and probe he'd not hesitated.
The painting is a reminder of why I can never be complacent
, Bill had said about the Rembrandt, but now I wonder if his displaying the print was more an act of nostalgia.

No one in Sylva complained, at least openly, about Bill's involvement, which spoke of Bill's competence but also the respect, and fear, my grandfather had garnered from being the town's sole doctor for four decades. If patients didn't finish an antibiotic or walked on a sprained ankle, Grandfather berated them, often in public, whether the person was a cashier at the drugstore or Mr. Ashbrook, who owned the bank. If it happened again, Grandfather refused to treat them, forcing a drive of twenty miles to Waynesville.
People make choices in life,
he'd told us often,
and you must accept
the consequences of those choices.
He was on the town council, and there as elsewhere he was deferred to. At election time, local and state politicians vied for his support. In 1961, another doctor opened an office in Sylva, but after six months he had so few patients that he left. People were afraid not to keep going to Grandfather.

Because he knew all their secrets, my mother claimed. He knew which husband had contracted gonorrhea, which daughter needed to visit an aunt for a few months, which mother took Valium. After two, sometimes even three generations of his care, how could any family not have something potentially embarrassing? But now as I look at this boutique that was once my grandfather's office, I wonder if small-town doctors derive as much power in those moments they probe, with hands and eyes if not with instruments, the body's most intimate places. How many years afterward might a person, though fully dressed, yet feel that naked vulnerability, that sense of surrender, like a dog exposing its belly to another dog?

Those who hadn't known Grandfather might believe the war experience had made him the way he was. He had certainly suffered physical pain, as the truncated
fingers proved, but trauma caused by fear seemed less likely. He'd told Bill and me that he never believed for an instant he would die in the war, even when the shrapnel tore into his fingers.
Some of us just knew we would live,
he'd said.
As long as we didn't tempt death, it would leave us alone
. Yet he had witnessed many others who suffered and died. Had it changed him? I'd asked my mother that question the day of his funeral.

“Your grandmother told me that when he was overseas, she'd prayed that he would not return,” my mother had answered. “This was soon after your father and I married. Your grandmother wanted to prepare me, I suppose, for whatever he might say or do to me. I don't think he ever physically beat her, your father said not, but your grandmother always seemed to be waiting for that first slap or fist. I'd see it in her face and in her body, mostly in her eyes. I cannot remember a time when those eyes rose high enough to meet his, Eugene, not once. Her dying may have been the only thing she ever did without your grandfather's permission.” But then my mother had paused. “Well, the
second
thing, which brings up the question of
when
during the war your grandmother started praying he'd not return. Funny, isn't it?” my mother had mused.
“All these years and I've never thought of that before.”

I have several photographs of my grandmother. One is when she is eighteen, at a cotillion, posing in the manner of a young woman well aware of her beauty. Then at age twenty-two in a
Sylva Herald
photograph at a war bond rally. She's dressed in a skirt and sweater but that same self-awareness is present, for the last time. Not the beauty, for my mother said she retained that into middle age, but the awareness that anyone would notice it, or that she would want them to.

During my early twenties when I thought that, like Wolfe, I might write my own small-town novel, I'd found a November 1918 article in the
Sylva Herald
's archives. “Raleigh Peddler Arrested After Altercation with Sylva Doctor,” the headline read. More articles had appeared in the following days. The evening after the confrontation, the salesman had disappeared. A fisherman mentioned seeing two men, one in a suit, another not well dressed and much taller, crossing the bridge outside town, but the following day the fisherman confessed to Sheriff Lunsford that he'd been drunk and seen no such thing, and Mr. Tillis, the hardware store owner, recalled the salesman had spoken of a desire to go to California. Although no one had seen him leave on the
bus, the sheriff surmised that, like so many men in their twenties, the salesman had headed west with a thumb in the air and a sense of adventure. The salesman's family demanded a criminal inquiry, insisting that he would have contacted them as well as withdrawing his savings from the bank, but there wasn't one. Three years later a femur was found on the Tuckaseegee's banks. The family returned, having heard nothing from the missing man for three years. A more intense search of the woods surrounding the riverbank yielded nothing more.

I have several clear memories of my grandmother—her hunched body, her voice so soft, even to children, that she was hard to understand. What I remember most is her giving me a palmful of Luden's cough drops, the closest thing to candy in Grandfather's house. She'd died eight months after my father, lingering one day in the hospital after a heart attack. My mother had been with her.
She was lying in the bed and simply turned her back to me and the nurse. Your grandmother knew she was dying and was ready and who could blame her
.

Of course your grandfather never believed he would die
, my mother had concluded. Bill had said the same thing about Grandfather, and so it had seemed prior to that
evening in 1974 when I'd found him in this same brick building. It was during the Christmas holidays. I was home from Wake Forest when Nebo came to the house and motioned for me to go with him. He'd unlocked the office's back door and motioned me inside, but he did not follow. Grandfather's neck lay on the leather chair's headrest. He stared at the ceiling, eyes and mouth open.
Astonishment
seems so narratively predictable, but I know of no better word to describe the look on his face.

I'm startled, as if from sleep, when the door opens and a woman comes out with a blue-bowed gift. A boutique, not an office. I pull out of the parking space and turn left onto Church Street and in another block take another left. As I drive back through town, I try to recall all I can about the day and evening Ligeia disappeared. After school I had waited at home for Bill to return. Hours passed. I told myself that maybe he'd taken her to Asheville, or already come back and gone out again. When my mother asked where Bill was, I told her that I didn't know.

It was after dark when he came in. I was lying on the bed, the radio playing, the one station I left it on drifting in and out. Bill hadn't spoken to our mother,
who was in the den, but had come up the stairs and straight to his bedroom. The door was locked but I pressed close and asked if everything was okay. Yes, he'd answered, Ligeia's on the bus to Charlotte. Just go to bed, he'd said. A few minutes later I heard the shower in the bathroom we shared. I may have listened to the radio a while longer or turned it off and closed my eyes, sleeping more easily than I had for days. I'm not sure. My next clear memory is of sitting at the breakfast table the next morning as my brother sat down to join me. A bruise purpled his left cheekbone and his upper lip was swollen.

“What on earth happened to your face?” our mother exclaimed.

“I was fishing,” Bill answered. “A laurel branch whipped back and nailed me good.”

I'd had branches do the same to me, and I knew he'd met Ligeia at Panther Creek. Surely that morning I'd have noticed if there were also scratch marks, the raking kind that fingernails make. Yet even so, why would I have thought Ligeia responsible? Or that she'd caused the bruise or swollen lip. After all, she'd boarded the bus to Charlotte and everything was fine. My brother had said so.

It is all so suddenly improbable—Ligeia falling in the water, hitting her head and drowning. A stream, a rock, a laurel branch. Improbable, but not impossible. To think otherwise, I have to believe my brother is a murderer.