Sleep No More

In the emotional trough left by this unexpected wave of grief, myriad images bubbled up from his subconscious. The first few made him shiver, for they were the old vivid ones, shot through with violence and blood. Waters usually steeled himself against these and pressed down all other remembrance. But today he did not resist. Because here, in the shadow of this stone, reality was absolute: Mallory Candler was gone. Here he could let the fearful memories go, the ones he’d always kept close to remind him of the danger. That she had twice tried to kill him and might do so again. Or worse, hurt his wife, as she had threatened to do.

In this silent place, less sanguinary memories rose into his mind. Now he could see Mallory as he had known her in the beginning. What he most recalled was her beauty. That and her life force, for the two were inextricably bound. The first thing you noticed was her hair: a glorious mane of mahogany, full of body, a little wild, and highlighted with a shining streak of copper from the crown of her head to the backs of her shoulders. Anyone who saw that streak thought it had been added by a stylist, but it had come in her genes, a God-given sign of the unpredictability in her nature. You couldn’t miss Mallory in a crowd. She could be surrounded by a hundred sorority girls in the Grove at Ole Miss, and the sun would pick out that flaming streak of hair, the cream skin, rose lips, and Nile-green eyes, and mark her like a spotlight picking the prima ballerina from a chorus. Tall without being awkward, voluptuous without being plump, proud without conveying arrogance, Mallory drew people to her with effortless but inexorable power. Waters often wondered how he had grown up in the same town with her and not noticed her sooner. But they had gone to different schools, and a population of twenty-five thousand (the town was larger then) made it just possible not to know a few people worth knowing. Mallory also possessed an attribute shared by few women of her generation: regal bearing. She moved with utter self-possession and assurance, as though she had been reared in a royal court, and this caused men and women to treat her with deference.

Thinking of her this way, Waters could nearly see her standing before him. He’d always thought the truest thing William Faulkner ever said wasn’t written in one of his novels, but spoken during an interview in Paris: The past is never dead; it’s not even past. Trust a Mississippian to understand that. Maybe every man was haunted by his first great love to some degree. For Marcel Proust, it had been a scent that acted as a time machine, bringing the past hurtling into the present. For Waters it was a smile and a word. Soon.…

Staring at the gravestone, he thought its blackness looked somehow deeper, and then he realized the light was fading. He glanced over his shoulder, toward the kudzu strangling the trees across Cemetery Road. A gibbous moon was already visible high in the violet sky, and the sun would soon fall below the rim of the bluff. The cemetery gates were generally closed at 7:00 P.M., but the time wasn’t absolute. If you were still inside the walls at dusk, you could see the dilapidated car of the black woman responsible for closing the gates, the woman herself sitting patiently in her front seat or standing by a brick gatepost, dipping snuff and watching the odd car or truck roll past on Cemetery Road. Waters knew she would be waiting for him at the “first” gate, where the old Charity Hospital had once stood. Now only a concrete slab marked the spot, but before it burned, the hulking hospital with its tubular fire escapes had towered over the cemetery, prompting tasteless jokes about doctors sliding the corpses of the indigent down into the cemetery like garbage down a chute.

He sighed and looked back at the gravestone: Died, New Orleans, Louisiana. He had often wondered about Mallory’s death, whether the woman who had once claimed to despair of life, who had tried several times to kill herself, had fought death when it came for her. In his bones he knew she had. The New Orleans police had found skin under her fingernails. But the family had not been interested in giving him more details, and no one else in Natchez got them either. The Candlers were that kind of family: pathologically obsessed with appearances. Typical of them to think that having a daughter raped and murdered somehow reflected badly on them, or on Mallory herself, like medieval bourgeoisie believing physical deformity to be a mark of sin. Waters realized he was gritting his teeth. The thought of Mallory’s parents could still do that to him.

For the first time, his eye settled on a smaller gravestone to the right of Mallory’s. Not quite half as high, it appeared to be made of a cheap composite “stone material,” so it stunned Waters to see the name Benjamin Gray Candler engraved on its face. Ben Candler was Mallory’s father. More surprising still, the stone appeared to have been defaced with a heavy tool like a crowbar. He stepped that way to examine it but stopped before he reached it. The smell of stale urine seemed to permeate the air around that stone, as if a dog routinely marked its territory there each day. There’s justice after all, he thought. Mallory’s father occupied a special place of loathing in Waters’s mind, but today all Waters pictured when he looked at the stone was a self-important man more than half in love with his daughter, trailing her with an ever-present camera, recording every social event, no matter how small, for what he called posterity.

The grinding whine of a pulpwood truck carried to Waters from the road. He glanced at his watch. 6:15. He’d already stayed too long. His wife and daughter were waiting for him at home. Across town, Cole Smith was priming two big investors with bourbon and scotch, preparing to drive them down to the well to await what they hoped was a huge payday. And thirty miles south, on a sandbar of the Mississippi River, a tool pusher and a crew of roughnecks were guiding a diamond-tipped drill bit the last few hundred feet toward a buried formation Waters had mapped five months ago, every man jack of them earning his livelihood from Waters’s dream. A lot was in play tonight. Yet he could not bring himself to leave the grave.

Soon….

He and Mallory had used that word as a sort of code in college, after they’d become lovers, which was almost as soon as they met. They spent every available moment together, but in the social whirl of Ole Miss, “together” did not always mean together alone. Whenever they found themselves separated by others but still within eye contact-at parties, between classes, or in the library-one of them would mouth that word, soon, to reassure the other that it wouldn’t be long before they held each other again. Soon was a sacred promise in the idolatrous religion they had founded together, the rites of which were consummated in the darkness of his dorm room, her sorority house, or the Education Building parking lot, alongside the cars of others who had no more comfortable or private place to go.

Soon…. To see their secret promise mouthed by a stranger-a beautiful one, to be sure, but still a stranger-had rattled Waters to the core. Kneeling in the fading light, he tried to convince himself that he’d misunderstood what Eve Sumner had said. After all, she hadn’t actually said anything; she’d only mouthed a word. And had she even done that? She had certainly smiled the most openly flirtatious smile Waters had received in years. But the word…was it really soon? Or something else? What else might Eve Sumner have said in that moment? Something mundane? Perhaps it hadn’t been a word at all. Now that he thought about it, the movement of her lips was a lot like a pucker. Could she have blown him a kiss? Maybe he’d been too thick to recognize the gesture for what it was.

Evie really gets around, Lily had said. Maybe a blown kiss was part of Eve Sumner’s come-on. Maybe a dozen guys in town had gotten the same smile, the same blown kiss. Waters suddenly felt sheepish, even stupid. That something so casual had sent him out to the cemetery in search of ghosts from his past…maybe the pressure of the EPA investigation was getting to him.

Yet he was not a man prone to misunderstandings. He trusted his eyes and his instincts. As he reflected on Eve’s actions, a long mournful note echoed across the cemetery. He ignored it, but the sound came again, as though a bugler were warming up for “Taps” at day’s end. All at once the sky went dark, and Waters realized the bugle call was a car horn. The woman at the gate was emptying the graveyard.

He got to his feet and wiped the seat of his pants, in his mind already walking back toward Jewish Hill. But he wasn’t walking. He could not leave Mallory’s grave without…doing something. With a hollow feeling in his chest, he turned toward the black stone.

“I’ve never come here before,” he said, his voice awkward in the silent dark. “And you know I don’t believe you can hear me. But…it shouldn’t have ended like this for you.” He raised a hand as if it could somehow help communicate the ineffable sorrow welling within him, but nothing could, and he let it fall. “You deserved better than this. That’s all. You deserved better.”

He felt he should continue, but his voice had failed him, so he turned away from the stone and marched up through the oaks toward Jewish Hill and his Land Cruiser, the horn blowing from the cemetery gate like a clarion call back to the present.