Behind the Bonehouse (7 page)

He asked questions about the options he was given, and eventually told them he'd sign the new agreement. And he did, the same one they'd offered Carl, all the copies and the addendums, once he'd called his next-door neighbor over to witness them too.

Then he sat, his square face sunken and crushed looking, his eyes tired and red rimmed, his dark hair thick and coarse, brushed straight back from his face, his heavy muscled shoulders straining against the back of the chair, while he stared at the turned off TV.

Bob Harrison watched him for a minute, then asked him in a neutral voice why he'd gone along with Carl.

“It wasn't you. I respect you a whole lot. You were real good to me right from the start. You didn't care that I dropped outta college, and it seemed like you trusted me to do things right.”

“I did. Until this happened. But that doesn't mean that there wouldn't be new things that we'd all have to learn to keep the business growing. You can't stay the same in business. You either grow, or shrink, or go out of business altogether.”

“It was Alan Munro changin' everything. You started talkin' to him and not me when we was trying to figure somethin' out. It's been him standin' in between us, actin' like he knows it all, and I got real tired of it. I figured I couldn't stick it out much longer, and if Carl and me had a business goin', there'd be some way for me to make a livin'.”

“There'd be lots of ways for you to make a living if you hadn't done what you did. Then I could've given you a good recommendation. You're a hard worker, and you're very mechanical. What I don't understand is why you didn't just come and talk to me, if you were having trouble working with Alan.”

“I wouldda looked like a cry baby. I was hopin' to be successful, and work on new products with Carl, and then you'd see I could do it without help from you or Alan.”

“And you didn't see that taking the formulas was dishonest?”

“Carl said he'd checked with his lawyer. That he owned the formulas, for having done the work, and it wasn't wrong for us to benefit too.”

Garner Honeycutt smiled and shook his head. “I very much doubt that he talked to his attorney. Harry Rasmusson wouldn't have said any such thing. Not if he'd consulted Mr. Seeger's signed employment agreement, which he had a hand in drafting.”

Bob Harrison set his coffee cup on the table beside him and looked across it at Butch. “Carl did the experiments we asked him to do. Lab-bench-level experiments designed by Alan or me. That's not the same as designing the experiments, or doing the formulating, or creating a product. And even so, any work done at Equine legally belongs to me as sole owner and proprietor. That's absolutely standard. It's stated right in your contracts. What I did that most people don't was to give you and Carl bonuses when a new product did well. Even so, there's a difference between what's right and what's legal. Taking those formulas was wrong.”

Butch set his coffee on the telephone table, just as Garner Honeycutt thanked him for the coffee, and stood up and walked toward the door.

Butch stood too, and faced Bob Harrison, then dropped his eyes toward the floor. “I'm sorry, Mr. Harrison. I can see it better from your side now. And I wish I hadn't done it.”

“I do too. I really do. I thought we could all work together.”

Butch stood on the side porch after they'd gone, a bottle of twelve-year-old Jefferson bourbon open on the table by the hammock, a cocktail glass with an inch in the bottom hanging loose in his hand. He sipped at it again, then drank the rest down, and wiped his mouth on the rolled-up sleeve of his denim work shirt.

He stood and stared at the big old elms, tall and wide and half dead most of them, twisted gray arms sticking up toward the sky in the darkening dusk. He watched the old willow too, weeping across the ground, being torn by the wind on the far side of the creek just past the edge of his land.

A storm had come up, rolling in fast, whipping leaves across the lawn as the first flash of lightning lit the night somewhere off on the west. He counted seconds till he shuddered from the crash that must've been five miles away.

The next bolt exploded closer, and he jumped before he could stop himself. He closed his eyes and shouted at himself, saying what he needed to hear, hoping that this time it might even work. Knowing it wouldn't in the long run. Because by then he was crawling up a hill in Korea, icy rain pouring down his neck, mud sliding under his hands, slipping away from his knees, slithering under his cold soaked boots while artillery shrieked, splitting the sky, as it pounded the world all around him.

Butch pitched his glass at the porch step, watching it shatter, as another flash of lightning hit off to his left, still flying in from the west with a freight train screaming wind. He held his hands over his ears, and waited for the next crash that didn't come. Then he pushed his hair back with both hands and lifted his face to the rain, shouting “Damn Alan Munro! He's gettin' just what he wants!”

Saturday, August 10th, 1963

Carl woke up on the sofa just before six, Cassandra curled on his chest, the ashtray overturned on the floor beside him. He sat up, as Cassandra jumped, and rubbed his eyes with both hands.

The house was silent, which was unexpected. Janie was always up by five, making coffee and fixing breakfast, or working in the study—and he called her name on his way to the bathroom, but didn't get a reply.

She could've been in the garden already, getting a start before it got hot, and he didn't give it much thought.

She wasn't in the bedroom, but her closet door was ajar, and when he opened it all the way, he saw most of her clothes were gone. Her suitcases weren't on the upper shelf, and her two favorite pillows were missing from the unmade bed.

Carl walked into the kitchen to see if her car was on the apron next to the unattached garage—but it wasn't. Which by that time was no surprise.

He splashed his face in the kitchen sink, looking out at the gardens she'd made, at the star-shaped leaves of the clematis vine getting tossed against the screen in a soft northerly breeze.

He grabbed a dish towel and patted his face, then went to the fridge for the can of Folgers, and noticed an envelope waiting on the counter addressed to him in her hand.

He turned it over, but laid it down again, then started the percolator, and made himself toast, and poured a glass of orange juice.

He ate the toast and drank the juice, glancing through the
Herald Leader
he hadn't read the day before, and finished his first cup of coffee too, and lit his second Lucky, before he poured another cup, and slit the back of the envelope.

Carl,

I have left you not simply because of the revelations of last evening, but because it served as confirmation of the character traits I have observed in the course of our years together.

When we first met in Bloomington, I felt great compassion for you because of the deprivations you had faced as a child, and your determination to work two jobs to save funds for college.

What I came to see after we married was that you take whatever help you are given as your rightful due because of what you lived through. You were not grateful to the pharmacist who took you into his home and gave you a job in the Depression, any more than you were my brother-in-law for arranging a Chemistry scholarship at IU, and letting us live rent free.

Even so, I was proud of you for completing your degree, and being promoted to the lab at the dairy. Then, totally unexpectedly, in 1939, I was introduced to the pharmacist who had taken you in. I have never spoken of our conversation. I have tried to thrust it from my mind. He told me that when he had asked you the year before if you would help run the pharmacy for a week while his wife had surgery, you “preferred not to use vacation days coming to you at the dairy.” You never returned his phone calls after that. And yet he spoke of you with sadness and confusion, rather than bitter resentment.

When war was declared after Pearl Harbor, I saw you rush to secure a job in a federal food lab that would keep you safely home. That disturbed me, though I chose not to let on. I married for life. And life is not easy. I kept my job at the IU library and wanted nothing more than a child.

After the war, when my mother was ill, and you were willing to move here so I could help care for her, I told myself that was an instance of unselfish concern. I later realized you were counting on my father to help you find a better job through his contacts at the bank. He did too. He introduced you to Bob Harrison when Harrison was getting started.

The hurt I have felt because you refused to adopt a child, I will not attempt to describe for it matters to you not at all. I have lived in emotional isolation, using the children I teach in Sunday school to help fill the very real void I have felt since we married—a work I do which you clearly scorn whenever the subject arises.

Yesterday, hearing what you have done out of premeditated greed and vindictiveness has forced me to make a decision I should have made long ago. I will file for divorce Monday. I no longer wish to communicate with you. I doubt you wish to speak with me. It will be the public embarrassment that troubles you most.

Jane

Carl folded the letter and slid it in the envelope, then held a corner in the flame from his lighter. He watched it burn to ash in the sink, while he said, “What a bitch!” twice.
Leave it to Jane to run with her paycheck, right when I need it most.

I ought to dig out the mortgage. And probably copies of the wills. And find the insurance contract too.

He threw down the last of his coffee, before he walked into the study—then coughed, and couldn't stop. He grabbed the corner of the desk and hacked for half a minute, facing the front window.

Elinor Nevilleson was raking her front lawn, surveying his house, and Terry's next door, her usual expression of curious contemplation fixed firmly in place, which seemed to make it harder for Carl to actually catch his breath.

Excerpt from Jo Grant Munro's Journal:

Sunday, August 11th, 1963

…I don't know why, but last night I woke up about three, thinking about when Tommy was killed by the ninety-year-old farmer who couldn't see his motorcycle. I started reliving what it was like bringing Sam and Maggie home from his place and having the horse trailer have a blow-out on a fog-bound mountain road.

I remembered being so filled with grief and frustration and anger that year, with having cared for Mom through the brain tumor, and then having Tommy die too—and it all came back right in the middle of the night with such power and detail it woke me up for good.

I went and got my first journal, the one I'd never intended to start, but did, right after Tommy's funeral—and reading that, while Alan slept on his side, breathing softly beside me, I realized even more than I had then how much Alan had helped me see how I'd been choosing to react.

Tommy had always been more than an older brother. He helped me grow up my whole life, especially after Dad died so young. Then worrying about him all through the war too, made him mean more to me than most brothers probably do. And Alan—having been in the OSS with Tommy, and spending time with him after the war—he helped me understand why Tom came back different. Why he'd taken engineering jobs all over the world before he'd moved to Virginia, and jumped out of planes for fun, at least every year on his birthday.

Alan had known how to talk to me the first day we met. He was older like Tom, and he'd been blown apart in France, and lost the woman who'd helped him heal. And yet he'd crawled out of the darkness, and it was his way of seeing, and his humor too, that helped me stop choosing to dwell on the worst and ignore what should've made me grateful. That, and the other workings of God. That I couldn't see then either.

It was Jack too, in a way. When I read again about him staggering onto my porch that night in a thunderstorm that rattled the world, dying and dirty and running from his torments, coming to Tommy for help—I could see clearly that it was having to help him, and having to help Uncle Toss too, after the stallion attacked him—it was doing something for somebody else, even though it seemed overwhelming, that helped me rejoin the world.

And now Spencer, after losing his mom in a truly horrible way, has lost Booker too. Alan and I need to figure out how to help him make his way through.

Monday, August 12th, 1963

Ridgeway Russell thought it would feel more relaxed and collegial if he went to Booker's house to read the will instead of his own office.

When he climbed out of his car, he'd been telling himself character was more important, while hoping mightily that age would count for something. Richard and Spencer were forty-one and forty. Martha was thirty-eight. Age
might
indicate maturity. Though it still remained to be seen.

They settled in the dining room—Ridgeway, at one end of the oval table, his salt-and-pepper hair hanging long and thick, his face tanned and as creased as an old shoe after a lifetime of working farmland in whatever time he could find for it. His three-piece tan linen suit was clean but wrinkled wherever it could be, and his old white shirt and brown-and-black tie were frayed and soft and comfortable looking.

He set his tortoise-shell reading glasses on the very end of his long bony nose, and laid his dented gold pocket watch beside a thick battered cardboard file tied with a wide black ribbon.

He wiped his eyes with a crumpled handkerchief, while he talked about when he'd first met their mother and how much he'd thought of her, before he passed out copies of two wills, and studied the faces of the family. They opened the files, but didn't seem to read much as they looked uneasily from one to the other and waited for him to speak.