Rock of Ages Page 3

“Mom, I don’t think they even use that word any more.”

  She lets it drop. She knows she is talking to someone who has spent two years living with the poorest people of a poor country, for not much more than room and board. He’s a good person, she tells herself. Get over it.

  Besides, she thinks, I can live with a little guilt. I’ve done it this long. Hit me with your best shot, Forsythia Crumpler.

  She stands there with her son, trying to digest the bagel, saying nothing else, watching the day come in.

  CHAPTER THREE

  October 19

  The funeral is well-attended, although the only blood relatives present are Georgia and Justin. A handful of cousins from the Atlanta suburbs send their condolences and regrets.

  Georgia isn’t really sure what comes next.

  She has no real interest in dealing with another sad old home no one seems likely to want; she doesn’t think she has the energy.

  Her own father’s property is proving to be a hard enough sell. No real estate agents are calling to ask if the house’s residents can disappear for an hour so prospective buyers can have an undisturbed look at what the multiple-listings book calls “a real charmer, a testament to country living. Be the master of your own estate less than 10 minutes from downtown offices.”

  As if, Georgia thinks, there were many offices left in downtown Port Campbell—only the police and fire departments and social services, which were not allowed to follow the stores to the suburbs.

  Jenny’s house might bring someone some money, but Georgia doesn’t really need money. She isn’t rich, but what her father unexpectedly left her, plus her own savings, invested well, should be enough. Plus, she inherited a respectable sum and a nearly-paid-for house from Phil. And she has a good pension. She can see herself living a life, 20 years in the future, that includes a tidy, low-maintenance condominium near the campus, a good meal in a good restaurant once or twice a week and a trip to Europe every year. She won’t be rich, but who would be fool enough to expect that, after a life teaching English literature?

  The congregation of Geddie Presbyterian Church has grown older and smaller. In Georgia’s youth, the church boasted more than 250 members. Now, there are 61, most of them far beyond retirement age.

  “The Presbyterians just don’t seem like they want to go out and recruit,” Jenny herself had told Georgia once, years ago.

  Most of them seem to be present at Jenny’s funeral, along with many from Shady Green Baptist Church on Ammon Road, where much of the rest of East Geddie’s white population worships. A handful of mourners come from the AME Zion congregation, including Blue Geddie, his wife Sherita and his mother, Annabelle.

  Georgia noticed that everyone at the homecoming two days before was white. The churches around East Geddie are as segregated as they ever were.

  Georgia was amazed at how short a space it took to chronicle Jenny McLaurin’s life in the paid obituary the Port Campbell Post ran Monday and Tuesday mornings. “Lifelong member of Geddie Presbyterian. Sunday School teacher. Church historian for 35 years. Preceded by loving husband, Harold, and son, Wallace.” No other mention of the little boy who, with his friends, liked to see how close he could get to the Campbell and Cool Spring freight train that came through twice a day, whose closed-casket funeral in 1958 Georgia was allowed to forgo.

  Georgia, on the front row, thinks her own funeral probably will draw a larger crowd—the rare past student whom she actually helped, her peers making what for many will be an obligatory appearance, neighbors and a handful of real friends, maybe a couple of ex-husbands.

  She wonders, though, if there will be the sense of loss, the true mourning, that she feels and sees here.

  It isn’t that people throw themselves on Jenny’s casket in loud, inconsolable grief. They are too country Presbyterian for that, too much of a world where effusiveness is a suspicious trait, a hint that there is something insubstantial in one’s very being. Georgia has been to funerals, usually Catholic and urban, where people stood up and told funny stories, often with the deceased as the butt of an affectionate joke, where the parishioners laughed and cried, and she has wished at times she had grown up in such a church.

  Here, there is a sense of quiet despair, the loneliness of seeing a lifelong friend depart forever. Women who have gone to grade school with Jenny sit stoically, dabbing wet eyes. Many of them have known her so long as Jenny Bunce that they still called her that even after she was married, for the rest of her life. They sit patiently, enduring and accepting loss as they have been trained to, while the minister, a man with no chin and a red face, leads them through familiar hymns and prayers, noting how this “good and faithful servant” has gone on to a better world. Reverend Weeks has been in East Geddie only 18 months, and he keeps referring to his notes.

  Most of the mourners follow the family to the memorial park in Port Campbell, eight miles from the church. Georgia notices that no one seems anymore to observe the old country tradition of pulling off the highway when meeting a funeral procession. There is much honking of horns and at least one near-collision as older drivers try to get through red lights and stay with the line of cars in front of them.

  At the gravesite, the little tent with two rows of folding chairs has room only for the minister, Georgia, Justin, and 10 or so of the oldest, closest friends. Under the tent and among those huddled outside in the gloom, Georgia sees the sagging shoulders, the trembling lips of old women bearing up.

  After a short prayer by Reverend Weeks, it is suddenly over. The crowd slowly disperses, stepping carefully around the ground-level grave markers, some drifting away to visit departed family members. Men and women whom Georgia knew well in her first 18 years come up to shake her hand and say whatever they can think to say. Some just nod.

  “She was a good woman. She was so sweet and so patient,” one of the women in Jenny’s circle-meeting group tells Georgia, dabbing her eyes with a tissue.

  “She made the best watermelon pickles,” another offers, shyly.

  “We tried to look after each other,” a third says, forcing a smile, and Georgia can only smile back. “We tried to see her when we could.”

  Georgia is looking around for Justin. She sees him, at the edge of the crowd, introducing Leeza (As what? My common-law wife? My concubine?), very pregnant and clinging a little uneasily to his arm. The first few drops of what promises to be an all-night rain begin to fall.

  Forsythia Crumpler is standing to their left, farther back. She is looking in her purse.

  Another friend of Jenny’s stops, and they talk for a few seconds. Forsythia pats her hand, and the other woman totters off to her car.

  For an instant, Georgia’s eyes meet those of her favorite teacher. She wondered whether Forsythia would decide to skip the funeral, but even after all these years away, Georgia knows that no one in East Geddie misses a funeral of anyone even vaguely known. It would be the ultimate disrespect.

  Georgia starts walking toward her, thinking that one more bit of unpleasantness can’t possibly make her day any worse, and she wants to take a chance on making it better. Just then, though, another woman calls to Forsythia, who turns and walks toward her, the chance gone as quickly as that.

  Georgia promises herself that she will, by God, patch things up with Forsythia Crumpler. She has always been able to make others like and respect her. She will not be pummeled by the flinty eye and sharp tongue of this self-appointed conscience. Isn’t she doing a good enough job without any help?

  Justin and Leeza are walking toward her, and the raindrops are falling more insistently when Georgia feels a tap on her shoulder.

  “I bet you don’t even remember me, do you?”

  Georgia does have to think for a moment. It has been a long time.

  She has seen William Blackwell perhaps twice in the last 25 years, at the only class reunion she attended, and in a chance encounter when Georgia was visiting Jenny.

  He had retained then, and does now, his one great talent
.

  William Blackwell scared people.

  The Blackwells live approximately half a mile east of Jenny’s house on Route 47. William, Georgia knows secondhand, has done well. He is now the patriarch of a family that lives in various dwellings over several acres, all within eyesight of each other. They own several hundred acres of farmland and lease much more than that, occasionally selling some off to real-estate developers, then buying more farther back in the country.

  In high school, William Blackwell had not played any sports to speak of, and he had been a sullen, indifferent student.

  Nobody, though, trifled with him. That was understood. He had not been a Bill or a Billy, even in grammar school. The lifelong “William” seemed to imply some sense of raw country hardness that did not truck with little-boy names.

  William Blackwell had been the best fighter in Geddie High School. Not even the best athletes—and Geddie had gone all the way to the state football championship game Georgia’s junior year—wanted any part of him. She could still remember seeing him beat one of the stars of the basketball team senseless. The other boy had taken offense because William had been caught down by the railroad tracks after midnight one evening with the basketball player’s steady girl, a friend of Georgia’s who thought she liked danger.

  What Georgia remembers of the fight is how William never lost the little smile, how he never said a word as he beat the basketball player, who was half a foot taller, from one side of the Soda Shoppe parking lot to the other, the other boy trying to engage him in conversation, trying to talk his way out of the worst beating he would ever take while still saving face.

  When it was over, William Blackwell was not even winded. He just picked up his London Fog jacket and walked off with it over his shoulder. The basketball player lost two teeth and missed three games with a broken nose.

  He had intimidated the teachers, most of whom chose to look the other way when William decided to slow-walk into class late, or leave early, or smoke a cigarette in the boys’ bathroom.

  He was famous for his cheating, blatantly copying other, smarter boys’ work, getting them to hunch a shoulder down, or just making them pass their test papers to his calm, scarred hand.

  Georgia’s senior year, there was a new math teacher. Mr. Jackson was a thin, pale 22-year-old with glasses, acne-scarred and fresh out of East Carolina. He noticed after one mid-semester test that William Blackwell not only had the same exact score as Harold Willey, who sat directly in front of him, but also had missed the same three questions. William and Harold denied cheating, but Mr. Jackson gave them both zeroes on the test and made it clear that he would not tolerate dishonesty.

  Four nights later, as Mr. Jackson was getting out of his Volkswagen Beetle at the little house he rented in Port Campbell, he was set upon by three assailants, whom he said he couldn’t identify. He spent a week in the hospital. When he was released, he took the rest of the term off, then got a teaching job in another county.

  Georgia had known, as had half the senior class, who the attackers were. Dwayne Sheets and Robert Packer usually rode around with William. Georgia had heard Robert Packer’s bragging account of what happened that night. William Blackwell had told the teacher, at about the same time he was breaking his ribs with his steel-toed boots, that he had better develop a case of amnesia, that if anybody went to jail over this, somebody was going to die.

  Thirty-four years later, the smile is still there, although not nearly as menacing, and his hands are the same. William Blackwell never had his hands in his pockets, or crossed, and never carried any books in them. His hands always seemed to be hanging loose, a fraction of a second away from the side of someone’s head.

  He had been a handsome boy, in a somewhat frightening way, with deep gray-green eyes that never seemed to blink. He was hard and thin; he never seemed skinny, only spare, as if the weight-room muscles of the athletes were too childish for his consideration. He had light brown, brilliantine hair that was always parted in a straight, severe line, cut every week by a country barber. Even as others succumbed to Beatle bangs, William Blackwell’s forehead shone high and proud. He could pass for 21 when Georgia and her friends were trying to get their first driver’s licenses.

  Once, when Georgia was breathlessly relating the latest William Blackwell atrocity to her father, he had sighed and said, “Well, he came by it honest.”

  Whenever some questionable transaction had been effected by intimidation or stealth among the farmers and store owners in the flat bottomland east of them, her father or mother would refer to it as a “Blackwell operation.” They always managed to get elected to such offices as their education enabled them to handle, a commissioner’s post or a school-board seat sometimes passing from father to son. They have flourished, as much as is possible without leaving eastern Scots County or getting a college degree, pouncing on large and small scraps of patronage.

  Georgia has heard stories over the years, from her father and mother and then from Jenny and in the occasional letter from old friends who never moved away. There was a fight with a Hittite man from down near the Marsay Pond, when William was 22. The man died of stab wounds, and it was ruled, finally, self-defense. There was a neighbor whose house burned after the neighbor sued, claiming he was cheated by William on a property transaction. The transaction had resulted in William owning land where the clover-leaf connecting the interstate to Route 47 was to be built. No one was ever charged.

  “William Blackwell,” Georgia says, extending her hand. “You haven’t changed a bit.”

  He has gained some weight. Anyone eating the deep-fried cuisine of Scots County would, and Georgia knows that what is considered hog-fat in her university town is no more than pleasingly plump in the land of her birth.

  The young man standing next to him, though, is fat even by Geddie standards.

  “This is my son, Pooh.”

  “Pooh?” Georgia can’t help smiling.

  “It’s William Junior, but that’s what they call him.”

  The man towering over William is a couple of inches over 6 feet tall and weighs well in excess of 300 pounds. His face, instead of the chiseled lines his father still possesses, is round and red, his thick red lips encircled by a Fu Manchu mustache, his eyes a pair of squinched-up slits.

  Pooh, looking into the distance, seems uneasy in his ill-fitting jacket and clip-on tie.

  “Hello, uh, Pooh,” Georgia says, and the younger man grunts a greeting. He meets her hand with what can only be called a paw, red like his face, hairy and freckled.

  By now, Justin and Leeza are at Georgia’s side, and she introduces them to her old classmate and his son.

  “Georgia,” William says, lowering his voice, “this isn’t a good time to talk, I know, but there’s something we need to discuss, about Cousin Jenny, bless her heart. She was a fine woman.”

  Georgia agrees that, indeed, Jenny was a fine woman.

  “You know, we’d been taking care of things up there, mowing the yard and checking in on her and all.”

  Georgia thanks him.

  “Well, she said she wanted to show her appreciation to us somehow, and that’s what we need to talk about.”

  Georgia suddenly remembers what Forsythia Crumpler said two days before. And she knows.

  The house. She gave them the goddamn house.

  “Yes, William,” Georgia said, “I guess we do need to talk. Do you think I need to get a lawyer?”

  The small smile. “Oh, Lord no. I mean, I can get David Sheets—you remember Dwayne, don’t you? Well, he goes by David now, has for years—I’ll just get him to come on over, to make it official and all. Can you picture ol’ Dwayne a lawyer?”

  Georgia can’t. She heard that he had come back from Vietnam and somehow gotten through McDonald College in five years, then was admitted into the first, easiest class at a new law school nobody seemed to need or want. She’s even heard about how he’s made everyone start calling him David because he thought Dwayne sounded too
redneck.

  Georgia suddenly feels a headache coming on, the kind she’s gotten occasionally over the past seven months, the kind she used to get from eating ice cream too fast.

  “Here,” she says, taking out a pen and a scrap of paper and writing out her phone number. “Call me. I’ve got to go.”

  And she leaves William Blackwell and Pooh standing next to Jenny McLaurin’s burial tent.

  William calls that night and invites all three of them to come for dinner the next Sunday; he says they can talk business afterward, “maybe have ol’ David over, too.” Georgia already has planned to visit an old college friend in Greensboro on Saturday night, though, and tells him she won’t be back until late Sunday. They finally settle on a 2 o’clock meeting the following Tuesday afternoon at David Sheets’ office.

  The day of the meeting, Justin comes with Georgia. The office is on the 12th and top floor of Port Campbell’s tallest building, on the old market square. It is one of the few addresses listed on the information board mounted by the lobby elevator doors. Ghosts of letters long-removed sandwich “Warren and Sheets” top and bottom.

  David Sheets and William Blackwell are already there, although Georgia made sure she arrived at least 10 minutes before 2. They look as if they have just shared a dirty joke.

  Georgia calls the lawyer “Dwayne” out of habit and is politely corrected. They talk for a few minutes about school days, when they had as little or less in common than they do now.

  Their business is over in 45 minutes. The building in which they sit is on the last substantial hill between Port Campbell and the coast, and David Sheets’ office looks out to the east. Georgia, staring out the window, can identify the rusted-out water tower in Geddie itself, and she imagines she could see Littlejohn McCain’s old farmhouse from here if she had a pair of binoculars.

  She adds little to the conversation—Justin actually has more questions than she does. The entire experience reminds her too much of the day they read her father’s will in this same building, and of the frantic drive back from Virginia that preceded it.