In a Dark Season Page 6

  She never went to the collection center! The realization spread a grin across Elizabeth’s face. The garbage bin was just an excuse to check me out—to see what I was doing and what I knew. I’ll bet Lee Palatt knows everything that’s going on in Dewell Hill, not unlike our own Miss Birdie on Ridley Branch. She doesn’t seem to like Tracy—that much was obvious. And she sure had a lot to say.

  “Nola never mentioned a niece—never talked about any living family at all. Someone told me there was a sister over in Leicester, but I don’t know if that sister’s still alive. I suppose Tracy could be her niece…” She had frowned and fixed Elizabeth with a troubled gaze. “What I don’t like is that Nola was just fine and then this alleged niece and her bald boyfriend come to visit and all of a sudden, Nola starts acting weird.”

  “How do you mean?” Elizabeth had asked, curious at the vehemence in the other woman’s voice.

  “You may well ask.” Lee had held up her hand to tick off the reasons for her concern. “First of all, the very night those two arrived, I saw Nola, sitting out behind her house on the bench under the apple tree. It was bitter cold and sleeting a little, but Nola just sat there. It looked like she was crying and I started to go over and see what was wrong. I got my jacket and boots on and was walking through my backyard to the little gate between our properties. Just then Nola’s back door opened and Tracy called out, ‘You won’t make things any better by getting pneumonia,’ in just the meanest tone of voice, and Nola stood up real slow and went inside.”

  Lee had paused, remembering the scene, then had added in a troubled voice, “Nola’s always been so straight and elegant in the way she moves, but that night she was walking like an old, old woman.

  “Two, when I called Nola the next morning, Tracy told me she was sleeping in. Well, I’d seen Nola through the window at her laptop, not ten minutes earlier when I took my trash across. I’d waved but she hadn’t looked up. And I’d seen that she was fully dressed, so how could she have been sleeping in? When I called again later, Nola answered but she sounded kind of distracted and said she couldn’t talk just then.”

  A third finger had been thrust out. “And three, why did Nola slam the door on Pastor Morton the afternoon of that same day?”

  It was a short trip to the Layton Facility, but there had been enough time to decide that the questions raised by Nola’s neighbor probably all had some plausible, as well as innocuous, answer. And if they don’t, what can I do? Maybe once I see Nola, it’ll all make some kind of sense.

  The one-story complex sprawled on a knoll just off the Ransom bypass, long narrow wings reaching out from the central entry area. A line of pine trees bordered the drive, imperfectly blocking the view of the convenience store and carwash below.

  Leaving her jeep in the visitors’ parking area, Elizabeth made her way past an inflatable snowman, sagging incongruously on the brown grass by the walkway. To her right she saw the identical windows of one long red brick wing of the building. A few winter-browned shrubs were planted haphazardly along the foundation, and here and there bird feeders provided entertainment for the residents behind those windows.

  “Room 167—down the hall, right at the dining room, left at the nurses’ station. It’s on the left.” The receptionist flashed a perfunctory smile and went back to her computer screen. Sitting in a wheelchair by a sparsely decorated artificial Christmas tree, a withered little woman in hair curlers and a pink robe cuddled a worn baby doll. She nodded several times and said something unintelligible. Elizabeth summoned a cheerful expression and stopped. “Hello. How are you?”

  “My baby,” was the slurred answer as the toothless old woman bent her head over the doll. “This is my baby.”

  Down the hall, past the dining room, a bingo game was in progress, led by a buoyant, youngish man whose cheerful patter was keeping most of the participants awake. The nurses’ station was ahead, with a gaggle of pastel-garbed aides—some pushing carts of cleaning supplies, others assisting frail residents to totter or roll toward the dining room. There was a pervasive smell of disinfectant with an undertone of human waste, and Elizabeth began to feel very depressed.

  A heavy man wearing a shiny black helmet lurched toward her, partially restrained by the aide who clung grimly to the belt of wide webbing that circled his jiggling girth. A growing stain of wetness ran down the left leg of his gray sweatpants.

  Elizabeth stepped aside as the pair continued their stumbling progress down the narrow hallway. The heavy man’s face was expressionless and his eyes were blank.

  Oh, my god, this is a dreadful place. Poor, poor Nola. A memory of one of Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings flashed through her mind. This is Hell and these lost souls are here for the unforgivable sins of poverty, illness, or old age.

  The door of 167 was open. Under the number were two names: Ronda Mills and Nola Barrett. A beached whale of a woman occupied the bed just inside the door. Her eyes were shut, her mouth was open, and she was snoring loudly. The outline of the coverlet revealed that she was an amputee—half of her left leg was missing. Just beyond this bed the flimsy green privacy curtain was drawn. Two figures were silhouetted against it.

  Elizabeth hesitated, not wanting to interrupt whatever was taking place, visit? care procedure? Should I knock on the door? A muttered conference seemed to be taking place on the other side of the curtain.

  “This is bad, Payne. After all this time—”

  A man’s hand grasped the edge of the curtain and tugged it back, rings rattling on the metal rod. His dark eyes widened at the sight of Elizabeth. “Yes? Were you looking for someone?”

  “I’ve come to see Nola.”

  The slumped figure in the wheelchair coughed as the second man lowered the paper cup he had been holding to her lips. He reached into the pocket of his suit jacket, withdrew a pristine white handkerchief, and carefully wiped Nola Barrett’s trembling lips as she slowly turned her head to look at Elizabeth.

  “I hardly recognized her. Her hair’d been cut—standard procedure for long-term care, the doctor said. And she didn’t have her glasses on, or the makeup I’d always seen her in. Her face looked so naked. And her eyes…it was as if she was pleading with me, but when she tried to talk, it was just garble. Phillip, I hope I drop down dead before I find myself in a nursing home.”

  She stretched out luxuriously in her bed, holding the phone close to her ear. Phillip’s voice was a pleasant antidote to the bleak memory of her visit to the Layton Facility.

  “There was a physician there? That’s pretty unusual for a nursing home. What—”

  “He wasn’t part of the staff. He has a practice in Asheville but his brother’s the pastor who called about Nola. They were both there visiting her. Evidently the doctor came out as a special favor. His name’s Pritchard—Dr. Pritchard Morton.”

  The Morton brothers had been a study in contrasts. Payne, the pastor of Dewell Hill Beulah Bethel Church, wore shiny black trousers and a permanent-press white shirt. His dark hair shone with hair cream and his ruddy complexion bore the scars of adolescent acne. His brother, the older of the two, wore a beautifully cut, or so it seemed to Elizabeth’s untutored eye, tweed jacket and immaculate wool trousers that broke gracefully over perfectly polished and probably quite expensive loafers.

  “So could this doctor tell you anything about the old lady—excuse me, about Miss Barrett’s condition?”

  “He said she’d probably had a stroke—but they haven’t run any tests yet and he’s not actually Nola’s doctor. But that was his opinion.”

  “Did your friend recognize you?”

  “I’m sure she did, but—”

  “She couldn’t communicate, right? I know a lot of the time people who’ve had strokes can’t find the right words for what they want to say. But then after a while, maybe with some therapy, they improve.”

  “Dr. Morton was saying something like that—though he didn’t sound as if he believed that it would happen in Nola’s case. But listen, Phillip, a real
ly odd thing happened.”

  She cleared her throat and continued. “After the Morton brothers left, I sat with Nola a while. I’d brought a book of poetry—I told you how she loved poetry. Well, I had the idea that if we couldn’t talk, then I’d read to her a bit. And I did and she seemed to enjoy it. But when I got ready to go, I took her hand to say good-bye and she held it in a death grip. She was trying so hard to say something but the words wouldn’t come. Then, all at once she began speaking in her old voice—perfect, precise diction. Phillip, she was quoting from Hamlet.

  “Jeez—I hated that play. We had to study it in freshman English. That guy Hamlet just drove me crazy—couldn’t make up his mind.” Phillip laid a hand over his heart and began to declaim, “‘To beeee… or not to be…’”

  “Ah…yeah. And as a matter of fact, that’s the speech Nola was quoting from.”

  The quality of Phillip’s silence and then the tone of his delayed reply were carefully balanced between polite inquiry and derisive incredulity. “Okay…and this woman who we watched try to kill herself…this woman who’s had a stroke or whatever and can’t talk…what did she say in her perfect diction?”

  “I came home and looked it up to be sure I got it right. Just a minute, I have the book right here…”

  Elizabeth reached for the heavy volume of Shakespeare’s plays and read,

  “…To die, to sleep—

  No more, and by a sleep to say we end

  The heartache and the thousand natural shocks

  That flesh is heir to—’tis a consummation

  Devoutly to be wish’d.”

  The Drovers’ Road II

  The Girl at the River

  They had wiped the last of the soup beans and fatback from the tin plates with the cold gritty corn pone, and the prisoners’ evening meal was but a memory. In the gloom of the cell, the two men settled themselves for the night. All was quiet but for the labored groaning from the other occupied cell—the lamentations of the town’s perennial inebriate, locked away to recover from the effects of an epic spree.

  The Professor breathed a disconsolate sigh. I could wish for a cigar to settle that repast, he said. Or a dram. But no matter; let us beguile the weary hours till bedtime with story. Pray, continue your account. You left your uncle’s farm to seek your fortune in the wide world. And at Gudger’s Stand you encountered the siren of the fiery gaze—this Belle Caulwell, I believe you called her. Please, expound further of this enchantress; I am ensorcelled.

  Lydy pushed his empty tin plate under his bunk and felt for the dipper gourd. It floated atop the water remaining in the bucket, and he took a careful draught before resuming his story. In the fading light his face was pale and very young.

  I see that I have got ahead of myself in the telling of it. And as we’re like to have plenty of time, I might as well give hit to you as it come to pass. Belle weren’t the first I seen at Gudger’s Stand. No, that come later.

  He pulled the thin blanket around his shoulders and took up the tale.

  Hit was first dark when the ferry man set me acrost the river. They was a gray mule and a half-asleep man atop him a-waitin at the landing and the ferryman he loaded them on and took off fer the other side. Fare ye well, young feller, he called back. Mind you don’t…but the words was drownded in the splash and tumble of the river.

  I looked up and seen the glow of the fires in the windows of the stand and could hear loud talk and laughin. Someone was scrapin at a fiddle, boots was a-thumpin, and I seen a man come out the door. He looked around, then walked kindly waverin-like to the end of the porch. There he took the longest piss I ever seen. He was still at it when two more come atter him and they stood there a-handin a jug from one to the other.

  Now, not havin a red cent to my name, I didn’t want to go up there and play the beggar. In the morning, thinks I, when hit’s more quiet-like, I’ll find the stand keeper and ask for work. So I went a ways off from the ferry landing and found me a little grassy spot long side of some big rocks. I set there and et my cornbread and listened to the music and all up at the stand house. Hit went on fer quite some time but at last they give over and the laughin and loud talkin begun to die away. I rolled myself up in my blanket and lay down.

  The fiddler was a-playing one last tune, slow and mournful, and hit seemed like they was voices in the river singin along with hit. I lay there, breathin in the smell of the water and the meadow, watchin the stars in the night sky, and tryin to make out the words.

  Hit was a girl singin what woke me. A sweet high lonesome song about a wagoner’s lad who was goin away and at first I thought that I was dreamin. But then I opened my eyes and seen a heavy mist risin off the river and little drops of dew a-coverin my blanket. I could hear footsteps comin closer and when I looked from behind the rocks where I was, I seen a girl totin a big ole bundle that like to bent her double. She was makin her way down to where they was a great flat ledge pokin out into the shallow water.

  She clumb careful-like onto the big rock and let that load drop down. Ooo-eee! she said and straightened up, a-puttin both hands to the small of her back, like hit was painin her some. The fog was burnin off now and I could see that she was young and thin, with yaller hair so pale hit was most white. I watched, keeping quiet as a cat a-layin fer a bird, whilst she leaned down to undo that great bundle. She begun to pull at the knot that held it together and I seen hit was naught but a great pile of blankets and towels and suchlike. Then she looped up her skirts betwixt her legs, tuckin them in at her apron strings, and waded a little way into the river, pulling one of the blankets with her. She had her a bucket of soft lye soap and she commenced to scrub at that blanket and beat it against the rock and dip it in the water over and over. And all the while she was a-singin that song, askin the wagoner’s lad to stay by her.

  At long last she had the blanket to where it suited her and she hauled it up onto the flat rock to begin to wring the water from it. Hit was a slow task, the blanket bein heavy, and time and again a corner would drop into the water and then hit would be to do all over.

  I stood up from behind the rocks and used my fingers to set my hair to rights. Iffen you don’t care, says I, speakin soft, so as not to spook her, iffen you don’t care, hit’d be a sight easier job was I to help you.

  Well, she give a little cry and walled her eyes at me, showin a deal of the whites, but still she stood her ground. I begun to tell her how come I to be there and afore long, I had took hold of t’ other end of that ol’ blanket that was aggravatin her so and we was twistin it dry and laughin like one thing.

  By the time that the sun was full up and the mist all burned away, ever bit of that washin was done and spread out on the grass to dry. She had told me that her name was Luellen and that hit was her pa what owned the stand. You come up to the house with me, she says. I’ll speak fer you and I know he’ll give you work. We’re in need of a hired hand as our last one has went off with a wagon haulin goods to Warm Springs.

  There was kindly of a hitch to her voice when she said that and she pulled on a big ol’ poke bonnet that clean hid her face, saying something about the sun hurtin her eyes. I thought of the song she had been singin. Well, says I, he must have been a rank fool to go off and leave such a fine place—and such fine company.

  She ducked her head and didn’t say nothing. We walked slow on up to the house. My stomach was growlin like a new-woke bear but she commenced to tell me all about herself and her family. I seen that iffen I wanted her help, I had better listen. Women-folk always do want you to listen.

  Howsomever, she told me that she was her pa’s only child but for a brother what had run off with a cattle drive some years back of this.

  My mommy died whilst I was still a lap baby, says she, and her voice begun to tremble again. And then my daddy married Belle, so as to have someone to look after me. She weren’t but only a servant girl, for all she gives herself such airs now.

  At last we had come to the house with its long porches and tall
chimbleys. The smell of fryin bacon was strong in the air and my mouth begun to water. I hoped that Luellen was right about her pa wantin help.

  As we come nearer I seen they was two big hounds—great red ones like what they use to hunt bear—and they was chained to either side of the steps up to the porch. They stood up all stiff-legged and the hair on their backs went up. The near one, an old bitch, lifted her lips and showed a mouthful of yaller teeth, some of them broke off, but the light-haired girl just said, Hush now, Juno, and led me up the steps.

  Chapter 7

  Marshall County Voices

  Monday, December 11

  Folks round here is tired of being treated like they ain’t of no account. These new people—they come in here with all their money, actin’ like they know everything and treatin’ us like ignorant hillbillies—”

  “It’s the God’s truth what Mason’s sayin’!” A heavyset woman, her head covered with tight, iron-gray curls, broke in, leaning across her husband to speak to the couple just beyond him. “Why, just last week, the morning after that heavy snow, one of them big ol’ SUVs with Florida plates on it stopped in front of our house and these folks piled out—there was five of them—and they went right to trompin’ round the snow in my nice front yard and runnin’ to and fro like crazy people, flingin’ snow at one another and mashin’ down my flower beds. Now I was upstairs, changin’ the beds, and when I happen to look out the window and seen them carryin’ on, I rapped sharp-like on the glass—”

  The mountain twang resonated in the voices of the group sitting in front of Elizabeth. She didn’t know them, but they were familiar just the same—the hardworking bedrock of the county—men and women who often worked day jobs as well as tending the small farms that had been a family heritage.

  Now another voice, a woman behind her, spoke. “These local yokels are just a bunch of bluster. When it comes down to it, wave enough cash under their noses and I promise you, they’ll sell that dear old home place in a New York minute.” It was an accent harsh and unlovely to her ears, and Elizabeth had to resist turning to stare at the speaker.