But sometimes, summoned or unbidden, images come to you and catch you unawares, snatches of things that used to be and aren’t anymore; one such for me was a July day when I watched him chopping wood in the heat, his tanned skin taut over muscle, shining with sweat, and I could hardly look at him for fear of giving myself away. Other times, I can feel him on top of me, the sweet heaviness of him; and I can smell him, his skin scented with woodsmoke and heather. Or it’s his voice I hear, a velvet voice like the dress that Jewel used to wear on Christmas day. She gave me a puzzle one Christmas with a thousand pieces to it, and no picture on the cover to show what it was supposed to come out to be. “You’ll figure it out,” she told me, but she was wrong.
If Jewel was here with me now, she’d say, “When you can’t figure a thing out, go back to your earliest memory of it. What was the first thought you can remember thinking? For heaven’s sake, think, Darcy, think….”
My earliest observation about Galen Creek, Pennsylvania, was that there wasn’t much to live for there, at least not much that you could tell right off. The women in Galen were mostly mothers, and the men were mostly miners. Mothers and miners, except for a few who farmed for a living. They shared something more than bitterness and something less than sympathy. They weren’t often kind to each other, and certainly never to us. But in Galen, no one expected kindness. Things were too hard for that, or maybe not hard enough. Everybody watched over their own miserable little lives and left everybody else to do the same.
Jewel thought them poor in spirit and said that was why they couldn’t be kind to anyone but their own. It was being kind to people who you didn’t even know that counted most. Jewel said a lot of things that didn’t mean much, and only a fool would have listened too closely.
Jewel was born someplace in Texas to the Reverend Roy Willickers and his wife, which probably accounts for her early distrust of men of the cloth. She had an angelic face and a shapely body, and boys tended to sniff around her worse than dogs. At sixteen, she was so popular that when she got pregnant, she couldn’t be sure just who of the three boys had made her that way. Honest to a fault, she told them so. Her candor took all the romance out of the situation, and nobody was too interested in marrying her after that.
The Reverend Willickers soon got wind of her predicament and he took her to a woman who gave abortions. But Jewel, unimpressed with the woman’s filthy back room, soured on the idea. Besides, she liked babies and wasn’t averse to having one. Her father, enraged by her refusal, beat her black and blue. So that night, she left Texas for good. Or at least that’s how Jewel told it. You couldn’t always believe her, not because she lied, but because she often embellished or omitted details so as to make the story move faster and be more interesting. In fact, the only thing she ever found intolerable in another human being was their inclination to tell too long of a story.
Jewel was vague about how she’d ended up in Galen, and I wonder sometimes if she really knew. She claimed that she had just been “following destiny.” Jewel was fond of words like destiny. She liked telling fortunes with picture cards and told everybody more about their futures than they ever wanted to know, but she was never as accurate as the blind lady who foretolld dinners.
I was born in a hotel, just off the turnpike, and Jewel named me Darcy after her mother who’d died young. Jewel hadn’t any money to pay for her room, but the hotel clerk, seeing how pregnant she was, let her stay the night anyway. He even found a midwife to help her. That was the night, Jewel said, that persuaded her to go into the hospitality profession, on account of that clerk’s kindness to a stranger.
A week later, Jewel was arrested for vagrancy and me along with her. Anybody else might have seen that turn of events as a major setback. But Jewel said her arrest turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to her. The police brought her up before the justice of the peace, who took one look at her and fell desperately in love. He not only kept Jewel out of jail, but he brought her home with him to his house in Galen Creek. The justice was an old man, but Jewel wasn’t one to hold age, sex, or even species against a person. She liked men, women, children, and animals with as much discrimination as a whore has for sailors. The old man was a widower who’d never had any children, and he doted on Jewel as both the wife he’d lost and the child he’d never had. When he died a year later, he left her a goodly sum of money and his ramshackle old house, so that she might turn it into an inn and fulfill her dream of joining the ranks of innkeepers of America.
I was barely a year old when the old coot went and not one for talking. If I could’ve talked, I’d have told Jewel then and there to be frugal with the justice’s money. As it was, by the time I was six or seven and old enough to advise, she had gone through
