Back here in the world, so strange and so familiar at the same time, this was my life. No sign of insight or epiphany peeking through floorboards, sound track of my days innocent of all but the din of memories going round and round. One longs for the three chords of a Hank Williams song to nose it all into place.
The short list was this: an old cabin I had every intention of fixing up, a job I'd blundered into, a clutch of friends likewise unintended. And Val. She was intended. Maybe not at first, but later on.
And always, the simple fact that I'd survived.
Miss Emily was happy to have me back, I'm pretty sure. The young ones were now getting around all too well on their own, straying into every corner of the cabin, not that the house had many corners, or that we could ever fail to locate them by their squeals. Val, in underpants and a faded Riley Puckett T-shirt, was asleep on the couch. When I kissed her she looked up at me blankly, focused for a moment to tell me 'J. T. had a call,' then plunged back asleep. Her briefcase was on the kitchen table. Labels of folders peeked above the edge. The Whyte Laydie banjo case sat on the floor beside the table.
'They want me back,' J. T. said, coming in off the porch after returning the call. 'Couple of federal marshals paid a call to a gentleman at a motel out on St. Louis Avenue and got themselves blown away for their trouble. All hell's broke loose.'
She took a glass off the drying rack and poured from the bottle before me, sat down at the table. Emily strode in again to check on us, snout worrying the air. Pesky offspring are bad enough. She's expected to keep track of us as well?
'I told them no way.'
'You sure about that?'
'I'm sure. You mind?'
'Not in the least. It's good to have you around.'
'Same here.'
I poured again for both of us. 'Listen.'
The outside door was open and she looked that way, through the screen. 'To what?'
Exactly. Too quiet. Not even frogs. Of course, it was altogether possible that I'd just grown paranoid.
At any rate, we sat there, had another drink, and nothing came of it. When J. T. went off to bed, I got the Whyte Laydie from its case and took it outside, to the back porch. Touched fingers gently to strings, remembering the songs my father played and his father before him, 'Pretty Polly,' 'Mississippi Sawyer,' 'Napoleon Crossing the Rhine,' remembering, too, my father's touch. The strings went on ringing long after I'd raked a finger across them.
'I had,' Isaiah Stillman would tell me on my second visit, as J. T. and Moira sat getting silently acquainted on the bench, 'the overwhelming sense that my life was a book I'd only skimmed- one that deserved, for all its apparent insignificance, actually to be read. Meanwhile, my grandmother was dying. We'd moved away and I never had the chance to know her. I went there, moved in with her-rural Iowa, a farmhouse in a place called Sharon Center, four houses and a garage, few besides Amish anywhere around-and saw her through her final days.'
Holding the Whyte Laydie close, I sat remembering my own grandmother who in my shallow youth had refused to acknowledge the cancer that all too soon took her, commanding Grandfather to walk behind so he could tell her if her dresses showed traces of blood. What did I have of her? A few brief memories, blurred by time. Grandfather I got to know when he came to live with us afterwards. Neither of my parents showed much interest in anything he had to say. I on the other hand was fascinated by his stories, in thrall to them.
'At the end, she went into a hospital in Iowa City,' Stillman said. 'Not what she wanted, but there were other considerations. Standing there by her bed, I watched the tracings of the EKG monitor, the hillocks it made one after another, and I saw them as ripples, ripples going out into the world, becoming waves, waves that would go on and on and in a way would never end.'
My grandparents had a country store. Ancient butcher block in the back, cooler full of salt pork, bacon, and other such cheap cuts of meat, an array of candy bars in one glass-front cabinet, another of toiletries and the like, worn wooden shelves of canned goods stacked in pyramids, the inevitable soft-drink machine with the caps of Coke, Pepsi, Nehi grape, and chocolate drink bottles peering up at you. You slid the desired drink along steel slats where it hung from its neck, into the gate, and dropped in your dime. Summers, when I spent a week or two with them, they let me work in the store. I'd hand over Baby Ruths, loaves of white bread, tubes of toothpaste, and squat jars of Arid deodorant, collect money, hit the key that so satisfyingly opened the register, make change. Most of our customers were black folk working on farms nearby. Afternoons, the white owners would come in, help themselves to a soft drink, and sit gossiping with my grandfather.
'You mentioned other considerations,' I said to Stillman.
'Local family members. Despite her mode of life, they were convinced-a longtime family legend-that Gram had squirreled away huge sums of money.'
Seeing me glance towards her, Moira lifted her hand in a sketchy wave. Moments later J. T. did the same.
'Funny thing is, she had, literally,' Stillman said. 'Almost a million. By then she'd given a lot of it away. Imagine how pissed they were.'
I did and, petty human being that I am, rather enjoyed doing so.
'What was left went into a foundation that I still oversee.'
'Without electricity or phone service?'
'Batteries. Satellites. A laptop.'
'What a world it's become.'
'Same way I went about finding others like myself. It took a great while. Whereas, before, it would have been hit-and-miss at best.' He stood and walked to clearing's edge, after a moment turned back. 'My grandmother was twelve when she got off the train at Auschwitz. A child, though she would not be a child much longer. She survived. Her parents and two siblings didn't.'
Folding back the sleeve of his shirt, he revealed the numbers that stood out on the muscles of his forearm. 'It's as exact a reproduction as I could manage. Many of us have them.'
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Cicadas were gone. Val lost two cases, won another, went on the Internet to pull down tablatures of 'Eighth of January' and 'Cluck Old Hen.' The reek of magnolia was everywhere, and single-winged maple seeds coptered down on our heads-or was that earlier? Lonnie resigned. 'Thing is, Turner, I don't do it now, I'm never going to.' Eldon had a new guitar, a Stella with a pearloid fingerboard from the thirties in which someone had installed a pickup. 'Not collectible anymore, but it still has that great old sound.' J. T. sat on the porch tapping feet, drinking ice tea, and saying maybe this time-off thing wasn't so bad after all. Don Lee was out of the hospital, making the two-hour drive to Bentonville three days a week for rehab. He'd tried coming back to work a few hours a day. Second week of it, June pulled me aside. He and I had a talk that afternoon. I told him he was one of the best I'd ever worked with. But you don't have to do this anymore, I said. You know that, right? He sat looking out the window, shaking his head. It's not that I don't want to, Turner, he said. With all that's happened, I want to more than ever. I just don't know if I can.
No further foul winds came blowing down out of Memphis.
Patently, I was an alarmist.
Town life went on. Brother Tripp from First Baptist was seen peering into cars at one of the local parking spots popular among teenagers. Barry and Barb shut down the hardware store after almost twenty years. Customers routinely made the forty-mile drive to WalMart now, they said, and, anyway, they were tired. Thelma quit the diner. Sally Johnson, last year's prom queen, promptly took her spot. Slow afternoons, I'd give a try to imagining Thelma's existence away from waitressing. What would her house or apartment look like, and what would she do there all day? Did she wear that same sweater distorted by so many years of tips weighing down one pocket? Robert Poole from the feed store left his wife and four children. Melinda found the note on the kitchen table when she came home from a late shift at Mitty's, the town's beauty shop. Took the truck. The rest is yours. Love,
