“At that comical tale you told.”
“If it’s comical to you, it’s comical to you. It never was to me. And it never was to Big Myra.”
Why it took so long for it to sink in, to penetrate my mind, that it might be true what she’d said, I don’t have any idea. Until then it hadn’t occurred to me even to wonder about it. But when she mentioned Big Myra, who I’d always supposed was my aunt, I suddenly had a flash. I saw the look Aunt Myra would have when she’d bring me a toy, a horn or a skateboard or a drum, that always made me so happy. She looked a little like Mom, a shade taller, and slim, but instead of being pretty, beautiful—pale, with blue-black hair and big black mountain eyes. That coloring, they say, comes from Indian blood. She doted on me, and God knows I doted on her—and I knew now the reason both ways. I went over to Mom, put my hand on her head, turned her face to the light, and said: “You’re telling me the truth?”
“Yes, of course I am.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“It was part of how we fixed it up. I had to promise I’d never tell you, so—”
“So what?”
“You wouldn’t mess things up.”
“With Aunt Myra, you mean?”
“Her or—anyone.”
It must have been five minutes before it dawned on me who she was talking about.
“You mean, my father?”
“I mean like I said, with anyone.”
“Goddamn it, answer me.”
“OK then, with him.”
“Who is ‘him’?”
“I don’t know; she never said.”
“Mom, spit it out. Who am I?”
“Don’t you think I’d say if I knew? Now that I’ve said this much? She was working in Logan County, had a job with the Boone County Coal Corporation, a typist or something. And a guy came along who was married. He was taking a survey for a bus line they wanted to run. She never would say who he was, and that’s all I know about it.”
More time went by while I soaked that up a bit. Then: “Mom, did he have something to do with it, the deal you made about me? Did he want you to take me too?”
“I don’t know. I never saw him. Maybe he came on, maybe he stayed with her there in Marietta while we were talking about it. She never said. I don’t know.”
“And why did you take me in?”
“I already said, I loved you.”
“And my father, I mean Jody Howell, what did he think about it? Did he love me?”
“At least he loved me—then.”
“And that’s why he agreed?”
“Well, why wouldn’t he agree? By then we knew I couldn’t have any children. The doctors had already told me.”
I already knew she had some kind of condition that made it impossible for her to have children, so I didn’t go further with it. More soaking in took place, with her sitting there in her chair, kicking her foot, and now and then looking at me. She had a hunted, guilty expression, not the one she had had when she kept staring at nothing. After some minutes, though, it began to gnaw at me that the whole story hadn’t been told. Now I had more flashes, of how my father had acted toward me, the cold way he had. I never felt toward him the way I’d felt toward Mom or toward Aunt Myra. Pretty soon I asked: “What made him so willing? So willing for you to take me?”
“I already said: he loved me.”
“Was that all?”
“It was all so long ago. I don’t remember.”
“Was any money paid?”
“Well, I would imagine so, yes.”
“How much?”
“I don’t know. It was paid to him.”
After a long time I asked, “Was it that that he used to buy the other place with and build that crazy house?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”
“Did he or didn’t he?”
“He didn’t tell me everything!”
“Was board paid for me?”
“I don’t know.”
“They wouldn’t have paid that to him. They’d have paid it to you.”
“Who is ‘they’?”
“Aunt Myra and my father.”
“Sometimes something was paid.”
“Like the first of every month?”
“I don’t know; it’s been so long.”
“How long?”
“What do you mean, how long?”
“Since board for me was paid.”
“I said, I don’t remember.”
“Is board still being paid for me?”
“You quit banging at me.”
“In other words, it is?”
She didn’t answer, which meant it was, and at last I eased up on her. I had to. By now I’d found out so much that my head was spinning around. I was like a cow that had cropped all the grass it could hold and had to lie down a while so it could chew its cud. I had no idea yet how I felt about it, whether I liked it or not, changing Mom for Aunt Myra or my father for some other guy I knew nothing at all about, except that he must have been decent and really in love with Aunt Myra to put out for me all those years. Also, of course, he must have been able to, which meant he was not just a nobody. All that, though, was stuff that just rattled around. One thing, though, remained to be cleared up. Why, after keeping her pledge all those years, did she up and tell me now? When I asked her, she sidestepped the question. “It had to come out,” she whined. “It had to be told sometime.”
“Why did you tell me tonight?”
“I don’t know, it just came out.”
“To make it all right for you to take off your panties for me?”
“How can you say such a thing?”
“Because it’s true.”
“It’s not true! You should be ashamed. You should get down on your knees and beg forgiveness of me.”
“I don’t. It’s true.”
“It’s not!”
“It is, but get this: It’s not going to happen between us. You know why? I don’t want it to, that’s why. I don’t love you that way.”
“It’s not what I meant, no!”
“It is what you meant. Quit lying.”
She started to cry, and I went over to wipe her eyes. Letting her blow her nose made me gulp; I wanted to kiss her, and did. That was my mistake. She grabbed my hand and kissed it and then pulled me down in her lap, kissing me and slobbering on me. Pretty soon I wrestled clear and said: “So—now we’ve gone over it, haven’t we? Really talked things out? Know what I want? Something to eat. I’m hungry. How about you?”
“You mean, you’re cooking my supper?”
It had an intimate sound, but anything to get to something different from what we’d been talking. “That’s right.”
“Dave, you’re so sweet.”
The peas and the salad were part of what had been brought by the neighbors that day. The chicken was from a package of legs already cut, that I’d picked up in market the day before. The pie and ice cream I kept on hand all the time. Whether she took my making her supper as meaning something romantic, that I can’t say, but the way she let down her hair, sitting there at the table with the torn dress twisted around seemed to say that she thought I’d changed now that I knew our relation was different from what I’d thought and that I was willing to make a fresh start. That’s not how it was with me. All I wanted was something to eat and a change of subject while I thought over all I’d heard. My head wasn’t spinning around, but it was turning and turning and turning as I tried to get used to it—that Aunt Myra was really my mother and that some guy who wasn’t yet named, some big wheel by the way he’d acted about me, was my father. She puttered around while I was washing up, grabbing a cloth and wiping the dishes, always taking care to show more than the law allowed. When we went in the living room she tried to sit in my lap. I turned on the TV and got the 11 o’clock-news. At last I said I was tired, and how about going to bed? She hemmed and stuttered but at last went to her room after telling me good night.
I went
to bed and was at last alone in the dark with what I’d been told. It may seem funny, but little by little things cleared. I found I didn’t mind that Aunt Myra was my mother—on account of her big black eyes, the way she doted on me, and the way I doted on her. But the rest of it—who my father might be—was just a great big ache, a hollow place in the dark I had to find out about. I was still thinking about it, or imagined I was anyway, not knowing I’d fallen asleep, when I moved and touched something in the bed. A hand was laid on me and a low whisper came. I must have jumped. “Don’t be scared, Dave. It’s me, Mom.”
I felt around. She was there, beside me under the covers, without a stitch on. I jumped up, or tried to jump up, but she grabbed me and held me close, still whispering: “I don’t bite! You don’t have to be afraid! Hold me close and love me! It’s all right! It’s nature!”
“It’s not all right. Get out!”
“No! No! Please!”
“Mom, I said get out! No such thing can happen between us!”
“But it can between you and that girl?”
“Leave her out of it, please.”
“I won’t leave her out of it, no such. We were happy—before she came—just the two of us, talking about how nice we would have it when our little dreams came true. I knew all the time that my secret, the one I told you tonight, would make it all right, what we wanted to do and what you had to do! Don’t you know that I had caught on to what you were going through? What a man your age goes through? What he needs from a woman? Don’t you know that I was willing? To give you all you wanted and more? You wanted it too, from me—oh yes you did. I could tell. Then she had to butt in. I hate her, I hate her, I hate her! Why did you take up with her? Why—?”
“I didn’t take up with her.”
“OK, you didn’t. So now it’s my turn, right now!”
“I tell you, no!”
“Yes, yes. Here, let me—”
I think there was more. The way I remember it, we wrestled and fought a long time, naked there in the blankets, me getting a startled idea of how young she really was, and soft and stacked. Finally I threw her out, out of the bed and out of the room, locking the door, which I should have done in the first place. Then I sat there panting, while she sat in the living room crying. Then it stopped, and I heard her go in her room. I got back in bed and tried to think where that put me. Pretty soon I heard her door open, but easy, an inch at a time, as though she was sneaking through. I braced myself for another session with her, wondering what I would do if she tried to break down the door. Then I heard the rasp of the dial and her voice talking low on the phone.
After a long silence, a hinge squeaked just once—the one on the front door. I heard a step on the porch, then nothing, and finally the sound of the car. Then lights. When I jumped up and looked out, she was driving down to the highway, toward town. Where she was headed, I had no idea and didn’t care, even slightly. All I could think of was that now, at least for a while, I was rid of her. I went back to bed and resumed where I’d left off, about this question I had to have answered, this riddle that was now my life: who was I?
10
I MAY HAVE SLEPT a little, but not much. I kept working on it, putting this, that, and the other together, that I remembered from when I was little and from what I’d been told occasionally. Then it was morning, and I knew I had to talk, to tell it, to let it out, to the one person I wanted to know it, the one person who mattered to me—Jill. I jumped up, went in the living room, and looked Marietta Memorial up in the book. I called and they gave me her room number; then she was on the phone.
“Jill, if you love me, get out here and get out now. Something’s happened, and I need you. Take a cab.”
“What’s your mother going to say?”
“She’s not here.”
“Oh my! I can’t bear it!”
“Jill, hurry it up!”
“OK, soon as I grab me a bite of breakfast and find out who’s paying my bill.”
“Forget about breakfast. I’ll make you some when you get here!”
I guess the next hour, while I stomped around out front, was the longest I’d ever spent in my life. Actually, I couldn’t make with the stomping until I’d put in my call to the place where I worked in town, the filling station I mean, to say I couldn’t come in, that I had to stay at home in case the deputies came for more questions. I hated doing it. I was in line for manager later on in the summer. My qualification for the job—my main qualification anyway—was that I was steady. I showed up for work every day. I was sober. I got things done. And the customers believed what I said. But as soon as I started explaining the fix I was in, Joe cut in. “Forget it, Dave. My God, it’s an honor. The whole town’s talking about you. You’re in every paper there is, you’re the county’s number one hero. Take all the time you want.”
I went out to think that over and walk around waiting for Jill. At last there was the rental car and then she was getting out, a bundle of newspapers under her arm as thick as a hickory tree. I kissed her and grabbed her to carry her in, but she held off and said she could walk—which she did with a limp but steady enough. She was still in the nurse clothes from the day before, but was due for a whole new outfit, later that day, she said, “from a shop in Marietta that Bob York found in the phone book. And a room in a hotel, a sure-enough hotel, to stay in as long as I’m here. And a thousand dollars cash to ‘tide me over.’ I’m Jill—fly me. Being a star pays.”
By then we were inside, and I folded her in. We stood there a long time holding each other close. Then we opened the papers on the floor. There were a couple from Columbus, one from Akron, one from Pittsburgh, two or three from Chicago, but none from Marietta. The Times is an evening paper and wasn’t due out until later. Sure enough, side by side on page 1 of all the papers, there was Jill and there was me—me in my sheepskin jacket, she in her hospital bed. There were also pictures of Shaw, a small inset blown up from a snapshot, and one of Russell Morgan with a pipe, looking important. How that happened, how all the papers had pictures when only three had sent reporters, had been explained by the Times reporter. They were wired to the papers. “It’s a regular gold mine for us,” the reporter said. “Boy, we’ll clean up on this—on top of the special we’ll send, signed by me under my personal byline.”
After a while we remembered breakfast. I made eggs and fritters. Then at last she asked:
“What was it, Dave, that you wanted to tell me?”
“I’ll get to it.”
“Well? I’m listening.”
But for some reason, to tell it that way was tough. I couldn’t seem to do it. A little later, though, when we were back on the living room sofa, her head on my shoulder, her hair brushing my nose, I began edging toward it. “Something’s come up,” I said. “Something Mom told me last night. Or this morning, whenever it was. Before she blew with the car.”
“Told you? About what?”
“Who I am.”
That was when I knew that what was between us two was a whole lot more than how pretty she was or how we loved each other. She twisted to look at me, then squinched her eyes up, and whispered: “OK, Dave, I’m with it. What is this?”
“She’s not my mother.”
“I wondered about that.”
“How did you catch on?”
“She didn’t act like a mother.”
“You can say that again.”
“What’s the rest?”
I told it little by little, going back to Aunt Myra—how beautiful she was, how wonderful she’d been to me, the things that had happened with her, like the time my cart got busted, when one of the wheels came off, and she took it to a garage to get it fixed. But I kept shying away from my father, until she cut in to say: “Dave, you can trust me. Say what’s on your mind, what you’re leaving out.”
“You mean, about him?”
“Who is ‘him’? Did she say?”
“She swore she doesn’t know.”
“You believe her?” r />
“I think if she’d known, she’d have said so. From what she said, he’s not from the Big Sandy country. Could be she never heard his name.”
“He must be somebody, though.”
We talked then, me with that wonderful feeling that I could talk it out with her. Sometimes we’d think of some angle together, like the deal that must have been made for my board and keep and expenses and how my father must have it, have plenty to lay on the line, to make such an arrangement as that, and how much he must love Aunt Myra.
Then she said: “Dave, something’s on my mind, my locket. I hadn’t expected to mention it, on account of her, her being here, I mean. It would have meant I’d have to come in, and I couldn’t have. But now that she’s not here—?”
“Your locket, you said?”
“I had it on a chain around my neck when Shaw pulled me out of that plane. It could be out there on the island! If we went out and looked now—?”
“Right away now, quick.”
We went down the path to the river, to row out in the johnboat. But when we got to where the boat had been pulled out on the bank, it wasn’t there any more. It was half-capsized on a tree, a snag from upriver, between island and bank, that had washed down some years before in the flood that made the island and which moved a few feet each year as a rise would lift it along. There had been a rise in the night, perhaps from Saturday’s rain, that had not only moved the tree but also the boat. “That’s nice,” I said. “You lend someone your boat and they don’t even tie it up right.”
“How do you get it back?”
“You’ll see.”
“Dave, don’t try to wade in or swim to that boat. You can’t. You’ve no idea how cold that water is.”
“Who’s swimming? Come on.”
We went back to the house and I called Edgren at the sheriff’s office. “Sergeant,” I told him, “I’m sorry to say that you or your men or somebody did such a careless job of beaching my boat that the river took it away. So it’s out in the middle right now, in a place where I can’t get it, on a tree trunk, half tipped over. So could you call your friends in DiVola and ask them to get it for me? Come in their cruiser and—”