Cementville Read online

  “Town?” Wanda’s mother was a woman of scant words, masterful at getting everything out of her daughter by employing as few syllables as possible.

  “Fryers are on sale at the A&P,” Wanda said now, “so I was going to stock the freezer. I thought I’d spend a little time at the library, pick up a new novel, some knitting books, maybe. I’m bored with these patterns I’ve used a jillion times. I’ll work my shift while I’m there—Charlene no doubt has several cartloads of books that need reshelving. She never manages to get to them all on her own, you know. Can I get something at the library for you? Oh, and I heard Mrs. Slidell has been sick. I thought I might drop by and see her. And of course I ought to run by the Cahills’ house and give June this cap I made for her cousin—remember Valine? Whose hair has all fallen out from the chemo and radiation? You remember Valine. She was two years behind me at Holy Ghost?”

  “Mrs. Slidell?”

  Wanda knew it wouldn’t slip by her mother. Nothing ever did. “I heard she’s pretty bad off. I don’t know any details, but she’s a lonely old woman and I didn’t figure it would hurt to let her know somebody cared enough to stop in and say hello. Now that she’s going downhill.”

  “Why?” Loretta set her cup in its saucer without a click.

  “I know what you’re driving at, Mother. As a grandmother, she has expressed no interest in me, and there’s never been any love lost on my part either. But I look at it this way—I could be in her shoes someday. Let’s face it, I am no prize. The likelihood of me living out my days alone grows greater with each passing moment. When the time comes that I find myself in Evelyn Slidell’s position, you will please pardon me for hoping somebody out there might bequeath a minute of their time to visit a lonely woman passing out of this plane and on to the next.”

  She helped Loretta get situated with her books and pillows in the front room. Wanda pulled on her summer sweater, a favorite despite the fact that it had shrunk in the sleeves, leaving her wrists gangling a good four inches from the cuffs. “You didn’t say—do you want anything from the library?”

  “Maybe some Virginia Woolf,” Loretta said, and then, in the way she always began sentences of a cautionary nature, “Wanda Ferguson Slidell, that woman is mean.”

  “For somebody who professes such disdain for the upper classes, you sure are fond of your blue-blood Brit-lit.” Wanda grabbed the keys to the Plymouth Fury off their hook by the kitchen door. “And I will don my evil deflectors before entering the dragon’s castle, Mother, not to worry.”

  WANDA SQUEEZED INTO A NARROW parking space at the library, right behind the dumpster, and sat for a good five minutes before the mad rabbit of her heart stopped its thumping. She tied a scarf over her head and pulled a pair of sunglasses out of the glove compartment. It was childish, thinking they protected her. But when she was having a really bad spell, the sunglasses did seem to help. She slipped through the back door into the Saint Brigid College Library and almost ran across the marble lobby to the wide stairs leading to the upper stacks. Charlene Cahill, her friend June’s mom and Cementville’s lone librarian, waved as Wanda flashed through.

  Wanda set aside two lace-knitting books whose patterns she hadn’t already plundered, Best American Short Stories of 1968, and The Waves for Loretta. She busied herself with reshelving until Charlene closed the library at four, then followed her home to the Poplar Bluff subdivision.

  Wanda had grown to enjoy visiting with her friend’s mom before June’s shift at the cement plant ended. Charlene Cahill was a good friend to Wanda in her own right. She was as extravagant with words as Loretta was frugal. Conversing with Charlene required no expenditure of energy or concentration on the part of the other person, so Wanda always brought along her knitting. She got the cable straightened out in Valine’s little red cap while Charlene recited the catalog of what all she was planning on putting up from the garden this summer. Wanda pictured the Cahill cellar already bursting with ten years’ worth of jarred tomato juice, sauerkraut, and pear butter. June and Charlene lived alone now that Mr. Cahill was gone, so who was going to eat all that? Wanda couldn’t find fault with it though. Her own knitting was no different from Charlene’s canning. It was what they measured time with. Three afghans, five sweaters, four or five shawls, countless mittens and socks—for Wanda that was a year. For Charlene, a year was thirty quarts of vegetable soup, twenty of grape juice, umpteen pints of apple pie filling.

  Wanda had to admit it—they were the same woman. But Charlene Cahill had managed to get married and appeared to be immune to panic attacks.

  Half-listening to Charlene, Wanda worked her way to the crown of the cap and thought back to a time when she didn’t even know what a panic attack was. She had just turned sixteen and had watched Mem take her last breath.

  The night before Mem’s funeral, Wanda was in the kitchen putting away leftovers. Loretta and Poose had gone to bed, worn out with the waking. All Poose’s and Mem’s old friends had gone home, and every surface in the kitchen was covered with casseroles, endless loaves of home-baked bread wrapped in tinfoil, and frosted jam cakes on crystal cake stands. Wanda wondered why people always brought so much food to wakes, when the last thing a grieving person wanted to do was eat. She turned on the radio and waltzed to the table, singing softly with Johnny Cash. She was scraping the last glob of scalloped potatoes out of Charlene Cahill’s CorningWare and into the slop bucket when a movement on the other side of the room caught her eye. She turned to see a grisly shadow in the doorway.

  “Uncle Angus—” Wanda tried to keep her voice even.

  “Sorry about yer granny, girl,” he slurred and opened wide the screen door and lurched into the kitchen.

  “Everybody’s gone to bed. The funeral’s tomorrow.”

  It was general knowledge that Angus Ferguson in his younger days had blacked the eyes of his wife Maddie and daughters, Bett and Arlene, on a regular basis. Broken bones. Other things, never mentioned, in Wanda’s presence at least, above a whisper. Her grandparents kept mum regarding the stain of generational violence on the Ferguson name. In fact their connection to the clan was rarely discussed at all, and Wanda was for the most part content to remain ignorant. But a person couldn’t help hearing talk in town. She had caught a glimpse once of Angus’s hunched-over wife at the Kirshbaums’ store. Maddie Ferguson lurched down the narrow aisles with the demeanor of an adolescent girl who’d been suddenly turned into a broken-nosed troll by some witch’s curse.

  That night in the kitchen, the unkempt old man staggered toward Wanda with his arms spread wide as if gathering in the cloud of his whiskey breath.

  “Ah lof yoo lil gurrl,” he blubbered, throwing his bulk at her. He fell on top of her, his skull banging loudly against the wall. He pinned Wanda’s flailing arms above her head with one big paw and jerked up her skirt with the other.

  Suddenly Poose’s shotgun divided the narrow space between them, the gun’s barrel pressed to his brother’s temple. Wanda could see the throb of his blood there.

  “Git, Angus,” Poose said softly.

  Angus Ferguson slammed the screen door behind him and stumbled off into the dark.

  Then Mem’s funeral. When Wanda fainted at the graveside, people took it as the grief. In the silence around the house over the following days, Wanda began to wonder if it had happened at all, the thing with Uncle Angus, except for the bruises along her knobby spine. She would steal glances at Poose, waiting for him to mention it to her in private, to say something that would ease her fear. He never returned her looks, never mentioned what had happened that night.

  Over and over again in the following days she grew dizzy over seemingly nothing. She worried she was losing her mind—the fluttering in her chest, the sudden unbearable perspiration, the pounding in her head. It was months before she could bring herself to tell Loretta about it.

  With the help of her mother—and Charlene and June Cahill—Wanda finished out high school, dragging herself through each day in a violet cloud of anx
iety. She made it all the way until Poose himself passed on, and then it was as if her last protection was gone. From there, things had only gone from near intolerable to worse.

  Wanda sat in the Cahill kitchen with Charlene now, listening to the woman’s comforting litany of domestic accomplishments, envying her homey pleasures. June sagged in around four thirty covered in gray dust. Wanda’s friend had been lucky—or unlucky, depending on your point of view—to land a desk job at the cement plant. June had been almost pretty once. The walls of the drab Slidell Cement office did not prevent the lime and grit from finding its way into every pore, every fiber of her clothing. She grabbed a Pabst Blue Ribbon for herself and a Grape Nehi for Wanda out of the fridge. They went outside and sank into the swing under Charlene’s grape arbor.

  “I hear that crazy fuck Carl Juell has been let out of the nuthouse,” June said. The smoke from her cigarette curled its fingers into Wanda’s nose.

  Wanda felt her face flush. This was not a subject she was prepared to discuss. “That was so sad about Jimmy Smith’s wife,” she said.

  “Awful,” June said, and pulled long at her bottle of beer. “You think Harlan O’Brien did it?”

  Wanda looked at her friend in astonishment. “Of course I don’t think Harlan did it! Why on earth would you say that? The poor man can barely string a sentence together, June.”

  “I heard the DA wanted to arrest him, but Judge Hume put the kibosh on it. War hero and all.” June inhaled deeply on her cigarette. “Strictly hush-hush.”

  “I’m sure the DA wants no such thing.” Wanda rolled her eyes, but her friend wasn’t looking at her. “Rumor loves nothing so much as filling the void where no story exists.” Wanda had her own theories about the Vietnamese woman’s brutal slaying but wasn’t sure now was the time to mention it. June had stuck by Wanda, in her way, through all the permutations of her condition, had driven her every day of that last miserable year of high school, had encouraged her to apply for the scholarship to Saint Brigid and to finish her bachelor’s in linguistics. She had been trying lately to draft Wanda into what passed for a social life in Cementville, which as far as Wanda could see consisted of drinking at Pekkar’s Alley, which was no doubt where June got the ridiculous idea that Harlan O’Brien had murdered Giang Smith.

  “I should think they’d be looking at Levon Ferguson before anybody else,” Wanda ventured.

  June stood suddenly and stamped out her cigarette, too close to Charlene’s zinnias.

  “What?” Wanda said with fake innocence, thinking: So it’s true. June’s been sleeping with that bucket of scum.

  “People need to lay off Levon,” June said.

  “All right!” Wanda whispered. “Christ on a bike. Somebody would think you were in love with him or something.”

  “He’s not the way everybody thinks he is. He’s had a life you wouldn’t wish on Satan himself.” June sat down and lit another cigarette. She puffed furiously and the swing pitched back and forth with vehemence. “Angus Ferguson, he’s the one that ought to be locked up. I can’t even repeat the things that pus-bag did to those kids growing up.”

  “June, you know I don’t butt into other people’s beeswax, but I wish you’d stay away from Levon. You know he’s been two-timing and beating tar out of Ginny since the day they got married, if not before. Besides, I’ve already got Mother to worry about, I don’t need to add you to my list.”

  “He’s getting divorced, for your information.” June at thirty was still given to pouts. “Arlene was a fool, letting a man like Angus Ferguson around her children, when she knew good and well—first-hand, in fact!—what he was capable of.” June pushed the swing harder and grabbed a fistful of zinnias. As the swing moved forward, she tore off every blossom within reach. She put out a foot and the swing lurched to a stop. “Sorry. Just remembered—they’re your relatives. Sorry, Wanda.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Hey, speaking of badly behaved kinfolk, you won’t believe where I’m going when I leave here, much less why.” Wanda was trying both to change the subject and to recapture the conspiratorial urgency with which she and June used to tell each other things when they were twelve and thirteen, letting it out in a single long breath.

  “Go on.”

  “I’m going to visit old Mrs. Slidell.”

  “Get out.”

  “Dead serious!” As soon as she said it, Wanda knew she could not tell June why she was going to visit the grandmother to whom she had not spoken in her entire life. Oh, Death came by last night and invited me over to my rich evil granny’s house for a quick tea party. June had been her best friend—admittedly, her only friend. There was a time when Wanda could tell June just about anything. Just about. But sharing hallucinatory dreams with another human being is shaky ground, even if you were not already an agoraphobic train wreck.

  Of course, Wanda didn’t believe it herself. She had waited all morning for the uncanny pull of the dream to leave her, the urgent sense that she was supposed to go and see her estranged grandmother. Estranged would have been putting it mildly. What she felt was a kind of second-hand hatred. The last time they’d laid eyes on each other, Evelyn Slidell had spotted Wanda in the parking lot of the A&P. The old lady turned straight around and hobbled back to her car on Martha Goins’s arm, forgoing groceries altogether rather than speak to her granddaughter.

  “Why, pray tell?” June sank into her more customary cool indifference.

  “Well, I heard she’s really sick. She’s probably dying, and I’m her only blood relative. I feel bad for her, all alone up there in that big moldy house.”

  “And there may be some money involved . . .” June rubbed her fingers together and squinted hungrily out of the corner of her eye.

  “Don’t be absurd. I heard she was sick, that she might want to see me. I am not going to begrudge a simple kindness, June.”

  “And this juicy lowdown came from . . .?”

  “Talk around town. You know, the kind of thing you overhear in the checkout line.”

  “You overheard people at the A&P saying that Mrs. Slidell needs her granddaughter—whose existence she has not acknowledged for thirty years—to come hold her hand while she trundles on home to Jesus?”

  “Oh, shoot—look at the time! Give my love to Valine.” Wanda tossed the little red cap into June’s lap and left her in her mother’s porch swing, pushing herself with one foot, shaking her head.

  THE SLIDELL MANSION WOULD BE imposing in a city of any size. In Cementville, it was a castle. Wanda puttered up the boxwood-lined driveway in Loretta’s ’61 Fury. The peal of the doorbell echoed from deep in the center of the house. Martha Goins, the nurse from Holy Ghost School, opened the door.

  “Wanda! I didn’t know Mrs. Slidell was expecting anybody today. Well, isn’t this nice. I was just getting her tea tray ready. Come on in, sugar.” Mrs. Goins huffed and panted the way big people do with the effort of a string of words.

  Wanda stepped into the foyer. A breeze rushed through the front door as though snatching a rare opportunity, setting the crystals in the chandelier tinkling. The familiar smell of old people roused itself, then settled into the corners like a cat declining to be disturbed. She thought of Poose and Mem, the way their clothes, the furniture, the house, came to smell of stale saltines and tea left sitting too long.

  “You must think I’m awful, Mrs. Goins. Here it is July, and I never told you how sorry I was to hear about Donnie Ray.”

  “So horrible, what happened to the little Vietnamese girl, wasn’t it?” Martha Goins clasped her hands in front of her and gave the barest hint of a nod to acknowledge Wanda’s condolences. She seemed to be staring at the air over Wanda’s shoulder as she burst forth with, “And how is that mother of yours?” She turned to the tea tray sitting on a table near the front door, rearranged the cup, the teapot, the budvase, letting Wanda know that grief was a thing one ought not tempt into getting the upper hand.

  “Mother is, well, Mother—you know her. Maybe I could pick y
our brain sometime about how to get her to behave. She won’t move to the downstairs bedroom no matter how clearly I outline all the reasons she should. We’d love it if you came by for lunch some afternoon.”

  “Name the date! I’m always looking for something to do.” An unspeakable sadness flitted across Martha Goins’s broad face before she pushed on. “Oh, say! Rate’s been talking to Carl Juell about coming on with him in the shop. Weren’t you two an item for a while when you were youngsters? I always said it was a shame the way that boy got shipped off to that awful place.”

  Wanda brushed her finger along the petals of some daisies on the tea tray. “Pretty!” she said, taking her own turn at being cagey.

  “Lunch with you and your mother would be nice. Speaking of which, I better not let this tea get cold. Mrs. Slidell hates that. Let me put a second cup and plate on for you. Why don’t you go on up. Visitors are not a regular occurrence, as you might imagine. Judge Hume calls every now and again, but even that has dropped off. Poor thing has only me to talk to!”

  “I’ll wait for you.” Wanda followed Mrs. Goins’s broad backside out to the kitchen where she fetched an extra teacup, a chipped Limoges, probably once exquisite.

  The staircase was one of those broad, carved, mahogany extravagances. Wanda’s carefully chosen outfit of khaki skirt and pink blouse was suddenly Eliza Doolittle–shabby. They were halfway along the wide upstairs hall when she heard the furious tinkle of a bell. The rabbit in Wanda’s chest thumped a frantic alarm.