Cementville Page 3

  “What do you think’s going to happen when Uncle Carl comes?” she said.

  “I expect we’ll welcome him home and see to it he’s got someplace to sleep.” Willis drew his goggles over his eyes again.

  In front of Maureen her parents pretended not to be concerned about the fact that a certifiable nut was about to move into their house with them. But she had heard them talking when they thought she was absorbed in Johnny Tremain, sitting in the glider on the porch. Katherine had made clear to Willis that she did not intend to move Willis’s crazy brother Carl into Billy’s room. “Well, what is it you plan to do with him then?” Willis had asked her last week, which Maureen thought was a good question. Her mother did not appear inclined to answer. Maureen had watched out of the corner of her eye as Katherine took a stack of sheets and blankets out of the closet and put them on the daybed out on the screen porch that wrapped around the house. Other than that, no particular plan had been put in place.

  “You’re not scared?” Maureen asked her father now.

  “What, of Carl? No!” Willis rarely got as exasperated with Maureen as her mother did, or if he did, he was better at not letting it show. He blew metal shavings away and went back to his work.

  She tapped her father’s elbow once, twice. Repeatedly. Willis turned off the drill.

  “Mother said that once Billy gets home we’ll have to wait and see.” It’s not that Maureen was trying to stir up trouble; she needed to get the lay of the land. It was still almost a whole year before her brother was to return from Vietnam, but still. All Maureen wanted to know was what would happen once Billy—the person who was really supposed to be coming home at some point—got home. “Will Uncle Carl have to go back to the insane asylum?”

  “People do not call them that anymore, Mo.” Her father breathed in long and let it out slow. “Why don’t you let Curly into the garden. She can root out the old corn stobs. Your mother’s on me to get the soil turned over before the rain comes.”

  This new summer was not even started and was already so deadly dull that even small tasks were welcome. Maureen sighed with exhaustion and obeyed. She knew it was wrong of her, but she was almost glad for the bodies coming home—at least it was something. There would be a whole week of funerals. She could barely remember the last time she was at a funeral. Would her mother even let her go? She picked up a stick on the way to Curly’s pen and jabbed at her foot with it as punishment for thinking so selfishly. She stabbed a little more, hard enough to make a tiny spot of blood pop out on her white skin. Of course she wasn’t glad those boys had died. It was awful and sad and the worst thing her town ever had to face. Her eyes watered and she clamped her mouth tight.

  The enormous pig lay on her side in the dust, her broad belly rising and falling with the gentle effort of breathing. Through the fence Maureen poked the pig’s bristled back.

  “Curly, you fat thing, get up.” The sow groaned with pleasure, thinking Maureen meant to give her a good scratching. “I said, get up.” Curly rolled upright and waited with somber grace for Maureen to lift the wire strap from the gatepost. She followed Maureen to the garden. The garden sat on a rise near the bluff and was edged by a loose amalgam of wire and post meant to keep Levon Ferguson’s hounds from running roughshod over the vegetables. Maureen noticed without alarm that the clouds had come to occupy a third of the valley’s ceiling. At least a good storm would be something to write about.

  Yesterday, she had begun writing her memoirs in the new diary. She had written about her mother’s refusal to buy her a bra, and about the mean thing a girl had done to her at the last-day-of-school party. But she had run into a dead end at the bottom of page two after crossing out I wonder what Eddie Miller is doing today. Maureen and Eddie were in the same grade at Holy Ghost, eighth come fall.

  She went to the swing under the big white oak, where she and Eddie used to take turns being pushed by their pretty young mothers. She stood on the swing’s plank seat and pumped herself high enough that her head brushed the new leaves. She could not let herself think about Eddie now, because thinking about Eddie made her think about his brother Brandon, who was one of the seven dead boys coming home today. Maureen’s mother had been visiting Eddie’s mother, Raedine, often since the Millers got word. “That woman is prostrate with grief,” Katherine said each day when she came home from taking soup and muffins and little presents and puzzles to distract the Miller kids from the fact of their family being torn to pieces.

  All of which made Maureen think morbid thoughts about her own brother, upon whom they had not laid eyes in a year. She had not forgotten the day Billy left, saying the hell if he was going to throw his life away grinding Portland cement same as every other poor bastard in this shit-hole town—this he’d said to Maureen, of course, not to Katherine and Willis. Billy was not yet at the point of cursing in front of their parents. He was only seventeen at the time. It occurred to Maureen, thinking on it now, that he’d had a birthday in a foreign country, lucky duck. But was somebody really lucky, being in a place where things were exploding every other minute? Her brother had wanted to go, he wasn’t drafted by the government or tricked like the guys who were in the National Guard. He’d signed up for it. She remembered sitting on her brother’s bed, watching him throw T-shirts and underwear and a toothbrush into a sack. “I’m the kind of man that demands adventure, Mo, here tomorrow, gone today,” he said. She took the underwear out and folded them neatly—the way their mother would have done if she was still speaking to him—and she put them back in the sack and reminded him that seventeen was not, strictly speaking, what you could call a man. To which he had squinted at her all James Dean. He peered into the mirror on his dresser. “Asia,” he whispered to his reflection, like he was conjuring a steamy land where flying howler monkeys and screeching birds made your spine tingle in the night. A blind person could see Billy Juell had plans.

  Maureen had not blamed her brother one second for itching to get over there.

  She wrote to him early on, but he did not write back, not once, not ever. Their mother was faithful, and now and then Maureen stuck things in her envelopes to Billy. A drawing of the horse they did not own, a stupid poem she’d gotten an A on, or lame drawings of Billy’s dog Paco whose skull had been squashed flat by the wheel of Jink Riley’s Corvette on Halloween. She remembered all the blood, and running home in her costume, wailing all the way.

  She clambered down the stone steps now to the springhouse half-submerged in the side of the hill and took a ladleful of water that came from the ground, so sweet and cold it made her teeth hurt. This was where her father’s father and his father before him had drawn water as a boy. In the olden days, water had to be toted up to the house a single wooden bucket at a time, Willis told her, until they got to where they could pump it through a pipe up the hill. Now the city has dammed the river ten miles downstream, making the big lake everybody calls The Reservoy. Gradually all but the remotest areas are going on city water. The big blue water tank can be spotted from almost any direction.

  Maureen caught a skink and carried it to the swing and sat petting it with one finger. When she turned it over to tickle its soft scaly belly, the skink slipped between her fingers and ran down her leg and into the tall grass by the fence. She sat, barely moving like the air around her, waiting, waiting. But for what? For her crazy uncle to come and turn their lives upside down? For her brother to get home—another whole year from now? For the funerals of the dead National Guardsmen? Yes that, all that. And this other thing: She was ready for her life to begin.

  She pumped her legs half-heartedly a few times but quickly gave up and hung there from the tree limb, still as a windless bell. She sighed deeply. Katherine’s fat sow grunted soft agreement from the vegetable garden.

  Maureen pulled the diary out of her pocket. The anvil-shaped cloud that had been assembling itself into a purple caul at the end of the valley moved almost imperceptibly closer. Maureen dragged a winter toe, pink and tender as a baby’s
, through the worn spot under the swing, pausing now and then to jot down a note. For my life to begin. She fell to imagining someone watching her, rested her chin in her hand, and set her gaze across the valley, picturing in her head how she might look to her voyeur. Her wrist fell asleep. She pitched the diary to the ground and twisted the swing’s ropes tight, then let herself spin out, dragging her foot in a narrowing spiral in the dirt. She was sick to death of this edginess, of the way the second hand of a clock seemed to sweep in slow motion around the inside of her skull, reminding her that time was passing and the world was passing and she was just here, here, here. Instead of winding down like a normal clock, she could feel springs inside her being coiled tighter. She was amazed that pieces of her didn’t suddenly go shooting off this bluff, blasting across the valley in bloody rain. She shoved her feet into her new flip-flops—it was the first day her mother had let her wear them—and flapped her arms awake to get the pins out.

  A cool breeze brushed her neck, and in minutes the purple curtain wrapped the whole sky. She heard the grating screech of the screen door and waited for what she knew was coming.

  “Maureen, get inside right now,” Katherine called.

  Maureen gave a last good twist to the ropes of the swing, leaned back, and whirled around, her body a stiff plank spinning in air like an acrobat. She stood and staggered a bit, relishing the dizzy buzz, then headed for the house. She was still giddy and grinning when, halfway across the yard, the hair on her forearms lifted and the air split and crashed together again and everything went white.

  Suddenly her mother was lifting her off the ground and her father was running to them, still wearing his safety goggles. It’s not even raining, Maureen meant to say out loud but wasn’t sure whether she had or not, it was all so dreamlike. A vibrating burning shock ran from her heel to her pelvis and feathered out into her belly. In the dream the three of them turned together in slow motion toward the garden where Curly lay on her back as if playing a serious game of possum, four legs stiff in the air. Maureen did feel rain then, spare gentle drops glinting through wan sunlight. Look, the sun! she tried to say. A second snapping strike hit so close her mother screamed, its clap a gunshot in their ears, and they were running toward the house, Maureen’s legs dangling and flopping from Willis’s arms. She was looking over her father’s shoulder and was the first to see it: The giant oak hanging over the machine shop shuddered and swayed as if to some music only it could hear, and in that long moment Maureen wondered if it would refuse to fall. The only sound was of her father’s heavy breathing in her ear. And then the sky unfastened with a sudden driving rain, the kind that makes dry ground roll up into little dirt balls for a split second before everything gets soaked brand new.

  “Sweet Jesus in heaven!” Virginia Ferguson said, waiting for them at the door, her voice trembling. She was staring beyond them. Then Willis, following the line of her gaze, saw it. His machine shop was buried under the oak tree, its massive trunk bisecting the roofline. The grownups all stood as if they had sprouted roots right through the kitchen floor.

  “You can set me down, Daddy,” Maureen said. But he carried her upstairs and her mother put her in bed against her protests.

  Are you all right, she’ll be all right, I’m all right. Ginny Ferguson had followed them upstairs, and all three adults were exchanging opinions on the extent of damage, real, potential, and imagined. Then there was the litany of blessings, the discussion of luck that always seemed to mean a lot to grownups at such times. Maureen herself could not decide whether she had been lucky or cheated out of finally having something truly exciting happen to her. She did not feel the way she imagined you were supposed to feel after being knocked down by a bolt of lightning. Katherine pulled the sheet over her and rubbed her arm.

  “Mr. Juell, I believe your girl saved your life,” Ginny said. “Her and Jesus.”

  Katherine and Willis stared at her blankly.

  “You ran out to get to her only seconds before that tree came crashing down and cut that shop smack in two,” Ginny said.

  This was an angle Maureen had not thought of. She looked back and forth between the three adults to gauge how magnificent this thing might be. She felt a poem coming on, but as quickly as a phrase came to mind it vanished, just as the lightning bolt had done. She sunk into the pillow and looked at the ceiling where a spider the color of putty picked its careful way toward the corner.

  “The main thing is nobody is seriously hurt,” Katherine said. She did not place much stock in coincidence, much less divine intervention. “You don’t hurt anywhere, do you, honey?” She rubbed at Maureen’s heel, which did not look a lot different from the way it looked before.

  “Ow,” Maureen said without conviction. The truth was the sting had disappeared minutes after it had all been over. “Curly got hurt,” she said. “Curly’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “We’ll worry about that later. You rest,” Katherine told Maureen, “and stay away from the windows.”

  Maureen listened to the grownups trundling down the stairs, their voices falling into that odd sorting of what to do next, as adults will after a hubbub. Ginny sounding fractious and entirely ready to be off this hill, Katherine trying to persuade her to wait out the storm, Willis insisting that he would drive her home.

  On her bedside table sat the stack of summer reading Maureen had brought home from the library. The room had grown dim enough with the storm that she switched on the lamp and settled into her pillow with Bleak House. She skimmed the first page, determined not to be put off by the fact that she did not know what a chancery was. Dickens was a first-class noticer of gloom and smoke and rain and fog. All the books she had chosen had scary titles that sounded as if they might shed light on possession by spirits. The House of the Seven Gables. We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Maureen believed she lived in a house haunted by ghosts—four, as best she could count—and she had resolved that this would be the year she finally communicated with at least one of them. The lightning strike might actually have been a stroke of luck in this regard. Granny Ricketts, the closest thing Cementville had to a witch, had told her that people who survive a lightning strike often end up with special powers.

  Maureen closed the book and pulled a cardboard box from under the bed. She opened the hinged game board flat. The four corners each held an answer: Yes, No, Hello, Goodbye. Maureen took out the heart-shaped wooden pointer thing (Augrey Ferguson called it the planchette, which sounded very authentic) and placed it in the center of the board. She rested her fingertips on it lightly the way Augrey had shown her.

  “What. Is. Your. Name?” Maureen whispered, and waited for the pointer to move among the letters of the alphabet arched across the board. Nothing. She did not want to believe she’d been gypped. She kept an ear cocked toward the staircase lest her mother decide to check on her. Regarding matters of the occult, Katherine was at least in partial agreement with the nuns at school—such things were gateways, if not for the devil, certainly for morbid thoughts that ought not occupy an adolescent mind.

  Not to mention Maureen had traded her brother’s Led Zeppelin album for it, her first real foray into dicey behavior. The thrill of stealing (borrowing, really, since she absolutely would replace the album before Billy got home) was enhanced by association with the notorious Augrey Ferguson. Some people called Augrey a slut, but she had offered to throw in a deck of tarot cards for a forty-five of anything by the Temptations, which Maureen thought was nice. “My brother doesn’t have any soul,” Maureen had told the girl, “only hard rock. Won’t your mom get suspicious if too many of her things go missing?”

  She could not translate Augrey’s snort.

  Maureen suspected it was the misfortune of being born a Ferguson that gave weight to the rumors about Augrey. Augrey’s mother, Arlene, had six or seven kids whose several unknown fathers she had never bothered with marrying, and she lived in a house trailer (a “mobile home,” Augrey was always correcting people) in Taylortown with the bla
cks and the other poor people. Augrey’s big brother Levon, who blacked the eyes of poor Ginny, was hated or feared or both by everybody in Cementville.

  It occurred to Maureen that this was the sort of stuff she ought to be writing in her diary. She jumped out of bed and ran to the window, because it also occurred to her that she had left her diary in the grass by the swing, and now it was buried under a three-hundred-year-old oak tree, its clean white pages surely soaked to a pulp.

  There were her mother’s footsteps on the stairs. Maureen folded the Ouija board into the unmarked box and tried to shove it under her bed. Too late. Katherine set down a tray of toasted cheese sandwiches.

  “What—?” she started to ask.

  Maureen burst into tears. “My diary . . . it’s under the tree!” she managed to get out between sobs.

  “We’ll get another. It only came from Newberry’s,” Katherine said. She took Maureen in her arms and rocked her as she had not done in a good while. “What were you putting away when I came in?”

  Maureen dried her face with her arm. “Nothing.”

  Katherine bent over and pulled the box out. She glanced at Maureen once, giving her a last opportunity to come clean, before opening the board wide enough for a good look.

  “Where did this come from?”

  Maureen stared out the window. The rain seemed to be slowing. “My diary . . .” she tried weakly again, almost forcing her voice to tears.

  “Maureen, I’m going to put this away until you’re ready to tell me where you got it.”

  “I traded something for it. With a girl I know.” She looked at her mother again. “Please. I need it.”

  “Need it? Sweetheart, there is nothing this meaningless scrap of cardboard can do for you.”

  “Then why won’t you let me keep it?” Maureen was crying in earnest now.

  But Katherine thrust the box under her arm and turned for the door.