A Gracious Plenty (12 page)

“I ain’t done looking,” I tell him. “And I ain’t leaving. I found my way in without you and I reckon I can find my way out.”

He shines his light in the doorway and says, “Well damn. You wouldn’ta thought the fellow’d been a reader, would you?”

And there are books on the ocean and marine biology, books of poetry and books of art. There’s a whole set of encyclopedias and a bunch of books he’d written in with a pen, but they’ve all suffered water damage. I have to peel the pages apart, and even then the writing has run together, words layered over each other like skins.

There are books on photography, but they’re in another trailer, this one divided into two parts. In one half, there are cameras and tripods and lots of pictures, some in frames and some loose. There’s a bathroom in this camper, but it looks like William used it as a darkroom. Pans of chemicals line the bottom of the bathtub, and when Leonard tries to turn on the water, nothing happens.

“Beats all I ever seen,” Leonard says. “He’s got a bathroom right here and don’t hook it up to the water.”

“There’s no water pump out here,” I tell him.

“How do you know?”

“He said so. Said there’s a creek running somewhere nearby, and he brought in water in five-gallon buckets and boiled it.”

“When’d he tell you that?” Leonard asks suspiciously.

And I recognize my mistake. Too late. “A couple of days ago,” I admit.

“Awww, Finch, damn it. We were having such a fine time,” and Leonard grumbles up his face and heads out.

“Wait a minute,” I call to him, because I’ve just seen something else. In the other half of the camper, my light shines on William’s music: sheet music and a stand, a violin and a horn of one kind or another. I pick up the horn and blow it flat.

“Get that thing outta your mouth,” Leonard scolds. But I just keep on blowing. I play him a medley.

“Can you believe Reba Baker wouldn’t sell this stuff?” he asks. “That’s ridiculous, if you ask me. It could be cleaned. Some of those children from the high school could use these instruments.”

I hand him the horn, put the violin in its case, drape a camera around my neck, and grab a handful of his pictures. I can’t even see them good in the dark, since they’re black and white, but I take them anyway—as mementos.

“Now can we go?”

“Soon,” I tell him. “Go ahead and set that down.”

I wander around behind this trailer and find an old RV, a small and ancient one. The hood is missing, and when I shine the light inside, I see that William Blott has built a fire pit for cooking right where the engine used to be. It’s tightly lined with stone, and in the bottom, pieces of charred wood cross ash. There’s a metal dowel stretched from side to side and a small cast-iron pot with something hardened in the bottom.

“Hungry?” I ask Leonard.

Inside the RV, Blott has a dining room, with a small Formica table and two chairs.

“Who do you reckon sat in that other chair?” Leonard wonders, but I don’t take a guess. I’m searching through the cabinet, looking at cans of beans. William must not have eaten anything else. No wonder he liked Reba.

There’s water stored in plastic jugs around the edges of the room, and dust covers everything, even the cobwebs—or maybe it just looks that way in the artificial light.

“Hard to believe,” Leonard says.

“It really is,” I agree. “He said a friend helped him drag in these campers years back, but it must have been a lot of years. I hate for his stuff to burn.”

“The man’s dead,” Leonard reminds me. “He won’t know the difference.”

“You got
half
of that right,” I say.

We stand in the middle, looking around, just staring out at the place.

“It’s amazing,” I tell him. “You’d half-expect to find a circus nearby.”

“Reminds me of gypsies.”

“I’m taking this stuff,” I tell him, pointing to the pile I’ve made.

“I don’t like it,” he says.

“She’s really gonna burn it, ain’t she?”

“Plans to,” Leonard tells me. “She’s gonna burn it off and clear it and then build a Christian park. His land goes all the way back to the road. He only used a part of it.”

We walk over to the costumes one last time, draped on the line, and I pull down a boa and throw it around my neck. The feathers have been wet and dried, and now they’re more itchy than fluffy, and matted, like a cat too fat to clean its back.

There’s a small tree behind the clothesline where William hung his hats. Fancy Sunday hats for ladies and railroad-worker hats. Even a ten-gallon hat. There are hats on every branch. I pull down a cowboy hat and stick it on Leonard’s head. He takes it right off, but he’s laughing.

I grab a lady hat with flowers and a veil, and I chase him down and crown him. It’s too small, but I push him to the mirror, which is nailed up to a tree, and I show him what he looks like. I shine the light on the mirror, and he looks nice.

Leonard finds a New York cloak and drapes it around my shoulders, holding his hands there for a minute. We stand in front of the mirror that way, with me cloaked and boaed and Leonard hatted and holding my shoulders, his fingers grazing my neck, one side burned and one side smooth.

I tell him, “William Blott’s gonna be so sad.”

I tell him, “William Blott thought Reba loved him back.”

I tell him, “William Blott can make baby—the babies stop screaming,” remembering just in time that Marcus is Leonard’s brother.

But he says, “The babies scream?” Then adds, “Don’t tell me that stuff, Finch. I don’t wanna hear.”

We leave sad, me and Leonard both. He carries the horn and the camera. I carry the pictures, the violin, the sequined dress.

T
AKE THE BABY
and go,” the Mediator tells me and Lucy. “Marcus doesn’t need to see William this way.”

Marcus is already crying, a throaty whimper. Lucy has to carry him. But I’m the one who’s been instructed to soothe him. Papa volunteered me. He reminded the Mediator that after the scrapings, he always took me out for a treat, and it always made me feel better, even if the burns still hurt.

But I beg to differ. The treats were distractions. Loving gestures, yes—but not comfort. I still felt the same way at the Tastee-Freez licking a vanilla cone. I still felt the same way with a fishing pole in my hand. And I know that Marcus will not be comforted, either. Not by anything
I
can do. I beg to be released from this assignment, claiming that I’m no good with babies. I never wanted my own and still resent my body for putting me through the monthly pains, year after year. I remind the Mediator of how unmotherly I am, but she pays me no attention.

Just my luck, I think. When my body begins to relax, relieved that it’s almost too old for the task, I get a baby shoved at me, a baby I can’t even carry or hold. Like I know how to
talk
to a baby.

“Finch, go play with him,” Papa coaxes.

“But I can’t pick him up,” I remind them.

“How tedious,” the Mediator answers, and pulls down her eyebrows to let me know her disdain. “Lucy, go with her. Take the baby and go.”

Marcus cries and screams and reaches his pudgy arms toward William Blott, who is balled up on the hillside, his head buried in the root of a tree, crying as if his lungs host flames. The Mediator has her hand on his back, and Papa’s there, too, saying, “Boy, you got to get yourself together.”

We head out, hurrying, and Lucy asks, “What happened?”

And I say, “I’ll have to tell you later,” and roll my eyes toward the baby.

“Somebody didn’t like somebody else’s lifestyle?” she tries vaguely.

“To say the least,” I answer. “You see that smoke?” and I point.

She shakes her sad head and adjusts Marcus to her other hip. We walk together, down the hill to my house, and the farther we get from the graves, the harder he screams.

“I’ll get him some spoons and let him dig in the dirt,” I holler above him. “That’s what Ma used to give me to play with.”

So Lucy puts him down at the edge of the garden and tries to show him how to push up dirt with his hands, calling, “Marcus, Mar-cus” in the sweetest voice she can muster. But he just gets madder by the second.

I run up the doorsteps and into the kitchen, grab a couple of spoons, and hurry back out.

“I think he’s got dirt in his eyes,” Lucy tells me, and sure enough, there are streaks of mud forming on his face, between the dirt and the tears, and he’s rubbing the balls of his fists against his eyes, his whole face red as a maple. I feel so sorry for him that I reach to wipe his face with my shirttail and run my hand right through his little head.

“Shit,” I say.

“I’ll do it,” Lucy offers, but Marcus bites her.

So Lucy nurses her hand and Marcus screams and I stand there jingling spoons, making a rhythm, making them dance like tap shoes, calling, “Mar-cus. Look, Marcus.” I play carnival. I try to put on a show. I kick my legs and click my spoons, but the only one I entertain is Lucy, who laughs in spite of Marcus’s wailing.

“You dance pretty good for somebody who never had lessons,” she teases.

I collapse on the ground, breathless. Lucy takes a spoon, and I take one, and we dig trenches all around him, plowing up dirt.

“Let’s play grave digger,” Lucy says, and we begin to scoop out a hole, and I try to involve Marcus, asking him to get us a dead cucumber to bury, but he just keeps screaming, his little chin quivering between bellows.

“Marcus? You can be the preacher if you want,” I tempt. “You can be the song leader, or you can say the prayer.” But he isn’t interested.

Lucy gets up and carries him to the cucumber row and helps him pick one.

Then we bury it with full honors, Lucy trumpeting out taps, her hands forming a horn over her lips.

“Dearly beloved,” I say. “We have gathered here today to bury this cucumber named Harold.”

Marcus lets out a hard-rollicking scream, and Lucy says, “This isn’t working. Let’s take him for a drive. That’s what Mama did with me when I had colic.”

“We don’t have a car seat for a baby.”

“Finch, he’s dead,” she reminds me. “It’s okay.”

So we get in the truck, Lucy and Marcus and me, and I circle the cemetery. He quiets down considerably after that, but as soon as I drive out in the community, he begins to cry again.

“Stick his head out the window,” I tell Lucy. “Let him get some air.”

So she holds Marcus by the hips, and I step on the gas, and we cruise for a while. I wave to every car I pass, because they’re all staring at me, thinking I’m talking to myself, I reckon.

All the dogs bark at us, and we laugh when the pit bull that guards the corner of Crabtree and Stanley whelps and cowers as we pass. Even baby Marcus gets a kick out of that.

We drive down Glass Street, and Lucy catches a glimpse of her place and asks me to drive down the alley, too, in case her mama or daddy is out back.

“I can’t,” I tell her. “I wish I could, but if I get caught in your yard again, I’m going to jail.”

“You ever been down that alley?” she asks me.

“Well, sure,” I say.

“We used to have a baby pool back there—right at the back of the yard. Me and Charles Belcher played in it for a hundred summers, it seems like. I guess you don’t remember it?”

“No,” I say, but I smile at her memory. It’s nice to see Lucy having a good one.

“I loved summers. I didn’t take a bath all summer long. I played in the water every day.”

I turn down Meadow Lane and wave to the preacher’s family, who’re painting their house bright yellow. I drive out by Glory Road.

“See there?” I show Lucy. “A renovated joint. I don’t know what happened to all the hoodlums who used to hang out there. Moved on, I reckon, after Reba Baker took over.”

“My daddy used to go there after work to shoot pool,” Lucy says.

“You can bet he’s not doing that now.”

She pulls little Marcus back in, and the wind seems to have thinned his anger, and he sits on her legs for a while just looking. It’s been a long time since Marcus has ridden in a truck, I guess.

We ride out toward William Blott’s land, where the smoke is so thick that I have to turn on my headlights. There are trucks parked along the highway, including some fire trucks, and it looks to be such a cluster that I turn before I get to the place where I entered the woods.

“I came out here last night,” I tell Lucy. “After the late news ran a story about William. Reba Baker talked hard,” I say.

She nods.

“She talked
hard
. So I figured somebody better get a thing or two that mattered to him—before it was too late.”

She nods again.

“Leonard helped me,” I tell her, and she looks at me cross. “He’s not all bad, old Leonard.”

But Marcus begins to whimper when I mention Leonard’s name. So I quit talking about him. Lucy doesn’t want to hear anyway, and I can’t blame her. I’ve tainted her notions of Leonard Livingston, talking bad about him for years and holding old grudges. I even found a way to blame Leonard for letting her mama think she was murdered—and we both know that Lois Armour would have found a way to do that on her own.

“You ought to give William his things,” she says. “Maybe he’ll feel better if you give him his things.”

“Maybe,” I say. “But the damage is done.”

We pass the post office and the medical clinic, and I wave to the Vegetable Man, who’s making rounds in our town today.

“I got a lot of respect for Blott now,” I tell Lucy. “He had his own way of doing things.”

She nods.

“He had a whole other way of seeing the world. Did you know he liked to take pictures?”

“No,” she says quietly, Marcus sleeping against her lap.

Then I make a mistake. On the way back to the cemetery, I drive past the house where Marcus grew up, the house where his parents still live, and he jerks awake suddenly and begins to tremble—like a washing machine with a load too heavy. His eyes fill up with tears, his little lip poking out.

“Look,” Lucy says.

“What’s the matter with him?” I ask her. “Marcus?”

But he doesn’t respond, and he doesn’t make a sound. He just shakes and cries silently.