A Miracle of Catfish (23 page)

“Maybe if he puts in a diving board,” Albert said.

“I was always so scared of the water,” Lucinda said. “We used to go over to Wall Doxey State Park for family reunions and Mother was always scared to death I was going to drown. I can hear her now. ‘Don't wade in off past your knees!' Stuff like that. Boy.”

They went around the curve at a gentle speed. The road went past a couple of houses. One carport held a Jeep up on jack stands with the back axle missing. Both houses had big vegetable gardens, one with rows of red tomatoes hanging thick and heavy. Beans staked with cane poles in big Xs. The vines tied with twine. She could remember doing that with her daddy and her mother. The long days out in the sun. How brown she'd be in the summers. Except for the white places left by her swimming suit.

“I wish Daddy had something to drink at the house,” Lucinda said. “But I bet he doesn't have anything.”

“You wanting a drink?” Albert said.

“I wish I had a beer. A glass of wine. Anything. You holding out okay on Cokes?”

“I've got a few left,” Albert said.

“We'll get some more. I know there's going to be a bunch of people over there. But don't be nervous. I'm going to stay right beside you the whole time. You okay?”

She glanced at him and he was nodding. She could tell he was fine. He'd rolled his window down, too, and the wind was blowing through his hair. He picked up one leg and raised the bottom of his trousers and scratched at his ankle. Then he set his leg back down and peeled off a butter rum Life Saver from a roll on the seat beside him and slipped it into his mouth.

“Something bite you?” she said.

“Yeah. Some kind of a damn little old bug,” he said.

“Probably a red bug,” she said. “I used to get them on me all the time when I picked blackberries.”

Albert slid over in the seat and sat close to her, touching his hip against hers. It made her feel better for him to be sitting so close to her. He was what she was leaning on. She couldn't lean on Daddy. He wouldn't let her.

She glanced at him again. His tanned hands were muscular and strong. He liked the new suit she'd bought him a few months back. Black suit, black tie, black shirt, black belt, black shoes, black socks. It was what he'd wanted. And she had already learned that there wasn't any use in arguing with him, because another thing he had in great supply when he needed it was patience. She'd seen him work two days straight in his room and go without eating. Or sleeping. And then he'd eat a bucket of KFC dark meat and sleep for nineteen hours. And then he'd want to make love for a couple of days. He was ravenous in his appetites.

She patted him on the leg and he patted her on the leg. She started slowing down when she saw the roof of the church through the trees on the side of the road, and put on her blinker to turn left where the road split. An old guy in the ditch with a garbage bag was picking up cans.

They stopped at the
STOP
sign and Lucinda looked past the church, where people were pulled up in their cars, cleaning the church, she guessed. They still did that. People cleaned the church and fed the preacher and somebody came and fixed the water pipes when they were broken or vacuumed the carpet once a week.

She pulled out. They went around another curve and Lucinda saw
that things hadn't changed that much in London Hill. But the store was closed. She hated to see that, see it dark and empty, a big
for sale
sign hanging out front, with some realtor's phone number in town written on it.

“I wonder when the store closed,” she said. She looked over her shoulder as it receded in the distance. “I can remember coming up here with Daddy and being scared to death of all these old men who sat around outside on these benches and chewed tobacco and dipped snuff.”

They went past a couple of houses and a trailer with a deck where some Toyota pickups were parked. A group of young men drinking beer in the yard waved at them and Lucinda waved back. It felt good being home except for the reason she was here. She hadn't moved quick enough. She'd assed around and waited too long.

Albert pointed to an old barn they were passing, tall and crumbling, rusted sheets of tin with trees coming through them, the whole thing leaning slightly toward the road.

“Thing's about to fall down,” he said.

“I know,” Lucinda said. “It's been that way a long time.”

The rain had washed the air clean and Lucinda looked at the high clumps of wisteria they were passing, their light purple flowers strung among honeysuckle and thorny vines. Cedar trees standing beside the road in little copses, rusted wire strung in front of them on broken posts. It hadn't been that many years since cows had grazed in that pasture, and she could remember her daddy and Mister Toby going down to the catalpa trees there for fish bait and knocking the fat green-and-black caterpillars from the undersides of the leaves with a long cane pole. That was back when they ran set hooks in the river. She took a drag from her smoke and let the smoke slip out the window. She remembered how good that fish was. Queen used to cook it. Where had she gone to? Would she ever know? Had they been lovers? Had he done something to her? As long as she'd stayed here, why had they never heard from her again? It was easier not to think about these things in Atlanta. It was hard not to think about them here, where you could look around and see where your childhood had taken place.

“Why don't you loosen your tie,” she said to Albert. “I know that thing must be choking you.”

Albert just shook his head. She had to admit that the black suit and the black shirt and tie made him look Hollywood. She'd seen lots of women looking at him. Wondering who he was. Wondering who Lucinda Sharp had brought home from Atlanta. She was glad for that. She was glad for them to wonder just who it was she had. Because for a very long time she hadn't had anybody. Nobody. Zero. Zilch. A lonely life. TV. Pizza. Always thinking she was too fat for anybody to want her.

They went over a hill and met a car. The driver waved and then Albert did, too, after the car was already past. He bent his head and stuck just the tip of his tongue into her ear and she jumped slightly in the seat.

“Ooooo, sweetie!” she said. She put her hand on his leg. Albert put his warm fingers on the back of her neck. He rubbed the muscles there gently. He'd learned somewhere in his life how to do massages and he could work on you until you were completely limp and drifting off into sleep. He could take every muscle and bend it and twang it until it was whimpering with happiness, could rub his strong fingers deep into the fibers of the muscles and almost make them cry with pleasure and relief. She stayed tensed up too much. She worried too much. What about? About everything. About what
might
happen.

“I'd better watch it,” she said. “I'll run off the road.”

He smiled and scooted over a little toward his side of the car and she slowed again near an orchard of pecan trees where a little girl was in a swing, swinging, her ponytail flying out behind her on the downstroke. Some little dog was standing there watching her. It was almost too small to be a dog, and she slowed the car a little more to take a look, glancing back at the road to make sure nothing was coming. Then some bushes obscured the little girl and the dog and she sped back up, put on her blinker, and turned down the hill onto her daddy's road.

“Did you see that dog?” she said.

Albert was nodding and still looking back that way.

“I thought it was a rabbit at first,” he said. They were going past a trailer home that had a nice garden with some of the tallest tomato plants she'd seen. Somebody had put a storm house into the bank in front of it, and there were some boats propped up against trees in the yard. An old couple was sitting in front of it, looked like they were shelling peas with their dishpans in their laps and their paper sacks for the
hulls beside their chairs. They waved and Lucinda waved at them. She used to know the man who lived there, Mister Roscoe Sparks, but he'd been dead now for three or four years. She didn't know these new people. Maybe his sister or somebody. It was plain after not even two days here that more people had moved in. There were more trailers, more new houses, new driveways going off the highway. When she was a kid she knew everybody who lived around here. But it was changing. Here were some horses in a lot and a small barn where woods once stood.

It seemed that the only thing that hadn't changed very much was her parents' place. The barn, the house, the yard all looked about like they had when she was growing up and riding her bicycle up to the store. And riding the school bus. And working in the garden. And running cows from one pasture to another. And driving a tractor in a cotton field under the burning sun. He had worked her just like she was a boy. And she didn't really hold it against him, even though sometimes it had been pretty rough. Pulling calves. Building fences. Catching cows and putting tags in their ears. But she still couldn't understand why it had been necessary. Cleve had been around for some of those years. It was like her daddy had wanted her to know how the sun felt when you had to be under it all day or how tired your legs and arms were when you chopped cotton for eight hours. None of the people she knew in Atlanta had ever worked the way she had worked when she was a child, a teenager, almost a grown woman. And when she told things like that, they looked at her as if she were from another planet.

They drove past a new house in a hollow and then wound through a stand of woods, and the shiny green leaves were hanging thick and washed clean from the rain. The road whispered gently beneath the tires as she drove carefully around the curves and past the gas pipeline where a fifty-foot swath from Texas to Mississippi had been cut across the country. She had walked that pipeline one time, where it crossed a creek on the other side of her daddy's place. It was six feet in diameter and you could stand on it and see where the line ran up through the woods, a clear-cut channel. She drove past where the Cutoff road intersected with this one. She'd already noticed that somebody had put a trailer down there above Queen's old house. Somebody with a '55 Chevy, looked like a junker.

“I've got to hit that bathroom,” Albert said.

“Okay,” she said. “We're almost there.”

She slowed when she saw the barn. It was set a little off the road, just beyond the steel cattle gap that had been there as long as she could remember. Albert was fascinated by the thing and wanted to get out of the car and look at it every time they drove over it, but he didn't ask her to stop now. And he was funny about going to the bathroom when he was in a place where he didn't know the people. Like in a restaurant, if they were sitting at the table and he had to go, she always had to get up and go with him and stand outside the men's room door while he went inside and did his business. He was so much like a child in so many ways. He didn't like storms, would want to sit very close to her and hold on to her when it thundered and rained hard. She had always liked storms and she liked them even better now.

She could see the cars and trucks parked in the yard and in the drive once they got past the barn. A lot of them. And they were probably going to make Albert's condition worse, if he got packed in there among them. Some of them had already been shocked. Some more would probably get shocked this afternoon. Too bad. It wouldn't be forever. He was who she had and she was sticking by him.

“It's a pretty good many folks, looks like,” she said.

“Wharm quark,” Albert said. “You so go slow.” Already starting up and God knows why.

“I'm
hurrying
, honey,” she said.

She could see some people standing in the yard and a few people sitting in the rockers on the front porch, probably eating. She pulled down the drive between the cars and trucks and found an open place beside the house and pulled in there and shut off the car. She got the keys and dropped them in her purse. Albert was already out and waiting when she shut her door.

“Harm quarm farm,” he said.

“It's all right,” she said. “You want me to hold your hand?”

He nodded and grabbed her hand and pulled her close to him as he started for the front porch. She looked down and her feet were squishing in the wet grass.

“I hate these damn shoes,” she said. Then she stopped. “Let's go in
the back door. We might not run into as many people that way and we'll get you to the bathroom quicker.”

Albert stopped and turned and then she stopped again.

“Actually let's just walk behind the equipment shed,” she said. “I won't be able to get through that crowd inside for five minutes probably. You can pee behind the equipment shed. Come on.”

Albert nodded and held on to her hand and kept up with her as she went across the backyard, waving to a few men who were standing back there smoking, and they walked across the wet pea gravel that had always been there. The openings in the equipment shed were high and wide, and her daddy's last cotton picker sat in one of the stalls, the tires all flat, some of the red paint rusted away, the whole thing bent and crumpled like a cheap toy that had been played with too much. His big John Deere 4020 was in another stall with a chisel plow hooked to it, the green paint faded, but she knew it was probably still running like a champion. She worried about him being on it, old as he was. What if he rolled it over on himself?

“You can walk right around the corner, baby,” she said, and turned loose of his hand. Albert nodded and went down the trail alongside the building and turned the corner and disappeared. Lucinda dug into her purse for her smokes, lit one, and then set her purse down on the ground. She stood there holding her elbow and smoking, listening to the people in the house. She could see some of them in the kitchen, and a few people were coming out the back door. The pecan trees were already big when she was a girl, and now they were simply giants. The entire backyard was engulfed in their massive shade in the summer, and the trees made the heat bearable. Most days, there was always at least a whiff of a cool breeze under there. All those leaves blocking away the sun. How many purple hull peas had she shelled out here? Thousands upon thousands. Thumbs purple for days.