Sweet Water Read online

  “Sure.” I took one from her. “So what about you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you in love?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Who knows? There’s not a hell of a lot to choose from around here. You can only go bowling with Billy Bob McCallahee so many times before you start getting a scary picture of yourself in curlers watching soaps, four screaming kids clinging to you while you pack ham sandwiches and cheese curls into a row of lunch boxes.” She sighed. “Besides, it’s been a long time. Would you believe I haven’t been with anybody since I split up with Chet? Everybody talks about saving yourself for the right one. Hah! All I’m saving myself for is middle age.” She took another bite of apple and waved her hand. “But enough talk about me. How are you doing? This place looks great.”

  I led her through the dining room to the living room, asking her advice about colors and light fixtures. We stood talking for a while in a patch of sunlight in the middle of the floor.

  “It’s so different from when Clyde and Granddaddy lived here,” she mused, looking around. “It was always so dark.” She went to a window and leaned out over the sill, then pulled back in surprise. “Holy bejeesus! Is that dog yours?”

  “Blue. I got him yesterday.” I came up behind her and looked over her shoulder. Lying in the shade under the window, the puppy gazed up at us and wagged his tail. “He doesn’t bark yet. I think he’s shy.”

  “What a cutie.” Alice made kissing noises out the window. “You should keep him in here with you, though. Dogs are like men. They want lots of loving, they just don’t know how to ask.” She turned and inspected the room. “You need some furniture. Mother’s bound to have some old chairs somewhere she’s decided are out of style. And what about a dining room set? Maybe Kathy’s got something you could use.”

  “Actually, I bought a few pieces I’m starting to refinish. They’re out back. But I’m keeping the dining room bare, for a studio. I want to take advantage of all this light. I figure as long as I have the space—”

  “Sure, you might as well use it.” She twirled around slowly, holding her arms out. “It’s hard to believe a family of five used to live here.”

  I leaned against the wall and slid down it to the floor. “What I can’t understand is why they’d just let this house sit here all this times. When did they move out—ten years ago?”

  “More like fifteen.”

  “There are still beds here. Even my mother’s.”

  “When they left, they just left,” Alice said. “Clyde didn’t keep anything. What she couldn’t give away she threw out or just abandoned.”

  “And it’s been empty ever since? Why in the world didn’t they sell it?”

  She sat down cross-legged on the floor. “From what I heard, she wanted to, but Granddaddy wouldn’t do it. He said somebody in the family might want it, which seemed a little strange, seeing how he never offered it to anybody. Of course, now it all makes sense. He was saving it for you.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t understand why.”

  “Well, we all have our own ideas. Guilt about your mama being at the top of the list. Getting back at everybody else maybe somewhere in there too. After the accident he felt like everybody blamed him for it—Clyde mostly, but all of us. And he was right, we did. There’s no question he was drunk and had no right to be.” She leaned back on her elbows and stared at the ceiling. “But nobody really knows what he was thinking. He pretty much closed up after it happened.”

  “Do you think he really thought I’d come down here?”

  “Well, he must’ve. What point would there be if you didn’t?”

  “But even I didn’t know. For a while I was all ready to sell it.”

  “Look at it this way. What did he have to lose?” She rolled over onto her stomach. “I don’t think it ever occurred to him that you wouldn’t come. That’s just how he was.”

  “He never even contacted me. Not once.”

  Alice reached over and squeezed my foot. “I think it would’ve been easier for him to give you a million dollars than to face you after what happened.” She looked at me for a long moment. Then she pulled back and sat up, brushing her hand along the floor, absently tracing patterns. “Can I ask you something? Don’t you get lonely out here?”

  “I get a little scared sometimes at night.” I smiled. “But now I’ve got an attack dog.”

  “Hah! That dog couldn’t frighten a rabbit.”

  “So he needs a little training.” I paused. “Sure, I get lonely sometimes, but I think it’s a good thing. This is the first time I’ve ever been alone like this.”

  “Isn’t it weird for you, being in this house? Your mother growing up here and all?”

  I nodded. “You know, it’s funny. Sometimes it feels like there are all these people here and I’m not alone at all.”

  Alice shivered. “Ugh. You’ve got to admit it’s a little creepy when you think about everything that happened here.” She winked mischievously. “Like that both our mothers were conceived right up there, for example.” She jabbed her finger at the ceiling.

  “Now, how do we know that for sure? It could have happened right here where we’re sitting. Or maybe even at a drive-in.”

  “Oh, come on—look at Clyde.” Alice giggled. “Does she strike you as the drive-in type?”

  “Who’s to say? I saw some pictures of her when she was young, and she had this kind of gleam in her eye. And she was very pretty.”

  “Really?” Alice said doubtfully.

  “Haven’t you seen them?”

  “Oh, I don’t like looking at old things. The past just seems so sad to me.”

  “Does it? I always think of the past as happier.”

  “Well, not for Clyde, at least from what I’ve heard. I don’t think she was ever very happy with Granddaddy.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for one thing, they used to call him ‘lunch-hour Romeo’ down at the mill. Remember that old gossip we ran into downtown, May Ford? I guess she was one of his Juliets.”

  I sat up. “Who’d told you that?”

  “Oh, nobody ever told me directly. If you live in one place long enough you get wind of everything.” She stretched out her legs. “Anyway, they say after your mother was killed he never so much as looked at another woman. Of course, he didn’t look at Clyde either, but at least he wasn’t catting around anymore.”

  “How terrible for her.”

  “Yeah, well.” Alice shrugged. “Who’s to say she didn’t drive him to it?”

  “Oh, come on.” Suddenly, inexplicably, I felt protective toward Clyde.

  “Look, everybody knows they had to get married because she was pregnant with Horace. So what if Granddaddy just got stuck with some woman he didn’t even love who nagged him and nagged him and drove him to drink and everything else?”

  I frowned. “Alice, no one can ‘drive’ anybody to do anything.”

  “Now, how do you know that? Have you ever tried it? My ex-husband used to say I drove him up a wall.” She looked at her watch. “Jiminy! Hal’s coming by in three hours. I’ve got to get my nails done and pick Eric up at the pool.” She stood. I stayed where I was on the floor. “Hey, are you all right?” she said, touching my shoulder. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  I tapped the wooden floorboards with my fingers. “I just didn’t know about all this.”

  “All what?”

  “Amory. The affairs and everything.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter now.”

  “It does matter.”

  “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “No, I’m glad you did. Now I know what he was really like.”

  Alice crossed her arms. “Well, I’m sorry I told you, because now that’s all you know.”

  “What else is there?”

  She hesitated. “You’ll never believe this now,” she said finally, “but I think he was a kind person.”

  I contemplated the floor.

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nbsp; “Look,” she said. “All you know about him is that he drank too much and he fooled around—and he was responsible for your mama’s death. But there was more to him than that. That accident—it was a shame, Cassie, it really was, but it was an accident. He was the one who had to live with it. He did his time.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake! She was my mother, Alice. I’m the one who had to live with it, not him.”

  “He had to live with the guilt, with Clyde, with it never being over. You and your daddy could go home and start again.”

  I looked up at her. “I can’t believe you’re saying that. You have no idea what it was like.”

  She leaned against the doorframe and shut her eyes. “You’re right. I don’t have any idea. It’s just that it was so terrible for so long, and Clyde was so awful to him, that in the end all I could feel was pity. And on top of that, knowing he left you this house as some kind of apology—”

  “Did you want this house, Alice?”

  She opened her eyes and blinked. “I don’t know,” she said. “It sure would’ve made things easier for me and Eric.”

  Her honesty surprised me. I didn’t know how to respond.

  After a moment she smiled wryly. “Anyway, it wouldn’t have worked out. He’d have left it to my mother, not me, and she’d have blackmailed me for it somehow.”

  “But Alice, if I had known—”

  “No,” she said firmly. “I don’t want the house, Cassie.”

  I climbed to my feet, brushing off the seat of my shorts. “But—”

  “Now, let’s just drop it, all right? Period, the end.” She poked at a large splinter of wood on the doorframe. “Besides, the place is falling apart.”

  “It’s true,” I said. “Just making it livable is costing me a fortune.”

  “I was wondering about that. If you don’t mind my asking, how can you afford it?”

  “I had a little money saved, but it’s running out pretty fast, a lot faster than I thought it would. I guess I didn’t add it all up. I’ve dealt with more plumbers and electricians and exterminators this week than I’ve seen in my whole life.”

  “You could sell off some of the land.”

  “I know, but I don’t want to do that. Not yet. I want to hang on to it for a while.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Well, maybe I’ll look for a part-time job, fifteen or twenty hours a week.”

  “Doing what?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I haven’t thought about it much. Just something to make a little money.”

  “Hmm.” Alice put a finger to her chin. “Have you ever wait-ressed?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, that’s okay. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to serve drinks.” She snapped her fingers. “I know just the place. Nice folks, not too smarmy, good tips. You mind working at night?”

  “No.”

  “The Blue Moon. I heard one of their waitresses left her husband and ran off to California.” She grinned. “With a woman.”

  We went out to the front porch. The puppy came bounding around the corner, and Alice reached down and picked him up. “Little boy Blue,” she said, holding him like a baby. He sniffed her face and started to lick it. “He’s got this lonely look in his eyes.”

  I took him from her and held him against my chest. “Are you blue, Blue?”

  Alice walked down the front steps to her car. “Wish me luck tonight. I’m trying to decide whether to wear black or white—whaddaya think?”

  “You’re pretty tan. I’d say white.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.”

  “If you need somebody to take care of Eric—”

  She flapped her hand. “He’s got a regular baby-sitter. Thanks anyway. Of course, if it turns out Mother’s paying her to spy on me, I might have to give you a call.” She got in the car and started it. “Call your grandmother one of these days,” she yelled above the noise. She waved goodbye, turned the car around, and disappeared down the long drive to the road.

  On the slab of wood in front of me I shaped a human form out of red clay. The form was about a foot high, with arms the size of legs and legs slender, joints like elbows. The head rested in the belly. Long toes extended from the feet like fingers. The face was long and thin, and as I worked I kept checking the mirror propped in front of me: the face I was shaping was my own. I narrowed the nose with my index fingers, carving a cheekbone into the curve of a hip.

  Out the dining room window I saw the field stretching in front of me like a child’s game, a coated cardboard landscape. I imagined it bedecked with life-size plastic shapes: black cows, a tall green tree with foliage like pom-poms, a yellow stile, a brick-red barn. Wiping my hands on a rag, I pulled out a pad and a piece of charcoal to sketch the slant of the hills, the jagged line where trees met sky, a black dip of pond, stooped lone trees scattered in the foreground. I imagined the clay figure in front of me five times the size it was now, sitting out there in the field. Drawing it to scale, I placed it in the lap of a hill and put X’s where other forms would go.

  I thought of the sculpture park I’d seen last summer at the Villa Orsini, the Stravinsky Fountain near the Pompidou Center in Paris, Niki de Saint-Phalle’s Tarot Garden in Tuscany, all filled with huge, fantastic creations. At the time the pieces had seemed unreasonably large, even grotesque, more strange than inspiring. But now, thinking back, I was struck by their claim to the land they populated and their hold on my imagination.

  With a hunk of clay I started on a head, as large as my head. I touched the bones in my face—the jaw, the hollow of a cheek, the line of my brow—smearing my face with red clay, like war paint. I traced the curve of my lips in the mirror and then repeated the motion on the soft, formless clay. I sat on the stool in the waning light of afternoon, working with my hands until it was too dark to see.

  She was my oldest girl, my charm. The other two were his; I don’t know where they came from, but they never had much to do with me. I named her Ellen Iris because irises were in bloom when she was born and he brought me some in the hospital—the last time, I believe, he ever brought me flowers. She was sickly and they didn’t know if she’d make it, but I knew. I knew.

  I had her to myself for fifteen months before Elaine came along. By then Ellen was walking and talking. She had thick dark hair and narrow fingers. She could always tell when I was feeling bad; she’d come and pat me on the face when I was upset, and when Elaine was crying she’d waddle over to her crib and stroke her hand through the slats.

  Elaine has been good to me over the years, she and Horace both. They’re good children. They didn’t move too far away; they invite me to dinner often enough so I don’t feel neglected; they call me, sometimes twice a day. And they never ask questions I might not want to answer. But they know, as they always knew, that to get Ellen back I would have done anything. I would have given up the both of them.

  Sitting at a round wooden table at a midsize bar on the outskirts of town, I filled in my social security number on a job application. The place was dark and virtually deserted and smelled faintly of ammonia. Chairs were piled up around me with their legs in the air, like a little forest. Behind the bar, a man with large forearms and a well-trimmed mustache was polishing glasses and hanging them up on a rack. He was wearing a T-shirt that said BETTER WET and whistling a country-western tune I was startled to find I recognized.

  Experience. I thought I should put something down, so I listed Grasshopper’s. Dad had never let me work there—“This is your home,” he always said. “I don’t want my kid to feel she’s got nowhere to go just to live”—but I had certainly seen the business firsthand. Besides, I reasoned, checking out-of-state references probably wasn’t a priority at the Blue Moon.

  “Where you from?” said the bartender.

  I looked up. For a moment I didn’t know what to say. “Just outside of town.”

  “Related to the Clyde family, by any chance?”

 
I nodded. I was getting used to being recognized; in Sweetwater, my face was my ID.

  “But you’re not from around here,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “No. New York.”

  “That’s what I’d’ve guessed.” He started putting away a case of beer steins.

  “Why?”

  “Your accent, for one thing,” he said. “Weird shoes. No makeup. Expensive haircut, no perm.”

  “You’re very observant.”

  He held a stein up to the light. “Cracked.” He tossed it in the trash. “You know, it’s a funny thing—you kind of look like your cousin.”

  “Which one?”

  “Well, that’s what’s funny about it, ‘cause from what I understand, he’s adopted.”

  “Oh, you mean Troy Burns? I haven’t met him.”

  “How long you been here?”

  “Almost a week.”

  “Well, that explains it,” he said. “Do you know Alice?”

  “Yeah, she’s the one who told me about this place. She heard you might need a waitress.”

  “Maybe.” He was putting steins on pegs behind his head. “You know, Troy used to have a band that played here all the time. They were real good, so they went off to Atlanta. He’s living down there with some other relative of yours—”

  “Ralph.”

  “Yeah, that’s him. I got to say Troy’s braver than I am, living with a guy who’s queer as a three-dollar bill. Braver or dumber, I don’t know which. People here don’t take too kindly to the swishy types. If he wasn’t Troy’s cousin I’m sure someone would’ve kicked the shit out of him a long time ago. He’s better off in the city.”

  While we were talking a tall, slim black woman came in. She was wearing a green sarong and a tank top, her thick hair pulled back with a green ribbon. “Ryan, why are you always so willing to act like a redneck at the slightest provocation?” she said, hands on hips, and turned to me. “Hi. Elizabeth Gibbons.”

  “It’s Troy’s cousin, Liz,” Ryan said. “She wants a job.”