Fat Lightning (9 page)

“You know why. I'm afraid God will strike me dead. Or I'll be banished from Monacan.”

“Sounds like a fate worse than death.”

She smiles, and Buddy puts his tongue in her ear. She asks him to stop, but she knows that she won't be able to stop on her own, and she doesn't.

They make love twice that night and again in the morning, and Nancy discovers that Buddy has learned a little about pleasing since their divorce.

“I just wish we were at my place,” he tells her. “I've got a basket chair that hangs from the ceiling and doesn't have a bottom …”

“Stop,” she tells him. “They'll have to pour cold water on us.”

They have breakfast with Sandy and Skip. Skip is smirking, making occasional comments that induce his wife to kick him under the table. Nancy is sure that he'll tell half the graduating class before next weekend. She's just glad that she and Sam don't socialize with the Burdens.

Buddy leaves first. Skip has to take him back to his car, which he remembers he's left in the lot at the John Marshall. Nancy and Buddy make no plans, but he gives her his phone number.

“I wish I'd known you when I was grown,” he tells her.

Nancy wants to be gone before Skip gets back. She's got a hangover and is feeling a little queasy.

“You shouldn't feel bad about this,” Sandy tells her. “What's a little romance between old friends? Besides, it's Sam's fault. He ought to have come with you.”

Nancy answers by turning quickly and throwing up, mostly on the grass beside her car. But then she feels better, and Sandy helps her get cleaned up.

And, on the way back home, she thinks to herself, maybe it is Sam's fault.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Nancy grew up in a family where the women did all the talking, and she's lived with Sam for more than four years, so his father's ways don't bother her.

Carter Chastain was the only one of his parents' children to go to college. He was older than most of his fellow students when he started pharmacy school in Richmond in 1920, living in a widow's boarding house and working as a janitor to help pay his way. He was always quieter than his older brothers, Lot and Warren, and the years of living by himself as a country boy in the city made him less dependent on human contact and more appreciative of silence.

He told Marie, before they were married, that he always wanted to live in Monacan, but that he was happy to be away from his home, mainly because of Lot. He told her that the happiest time of his boyhood was the two years that Lot was away in the Army. He said that Lot wrote him one time, from some camp in Texas, a rambling note full of hellfire and bile. At the end of the letter, he scribbled, “They'll be coming for you next.”

He and Marie had grown up going to the same Baptist church, and he courted her in high school. She waited for him five years while he finished his schooling, then two more while he saved some money working at the drug store that Lavertis Turpin, a widower with no children, would sell to him before he died. Because Carter didn't say much, people in their community thought he would never have the nerve or spirit to ask Marie to marry him, that they'd just go on dating. But only she knew that he'd asked her to wait for him the day they graduated from high school, and she kept her vow in silence until he was ready.

Marie and Carter had a daughter, Elizabeth, who was born in 1936, in their ninth year of marriage, after they thought they couldn't have children. Three years later, their son was born, and they named him Samuel Warren Chastain, after his grandfather and his uncle, who died in France in 1918.

The next year, 1940, on a day in early May, Carter came home for lunch as he usually did. The children always looked forward to his appearance, and he would play with them as much as time permitted before he went back to the store.

On this day, he did something spontaneous, which was unusual for Carter. He asked Lizzie if she would like to go with Daddy while he made some deliveries in the western part of the county. He remembered later that he'd done it because she looked so pretty in the pink, frilly dress Marie had made for her. She had her mother's dark hair and big brown eyes, and she had a disposition that made Marie the envy of every other mother in the neighborhood. Sam, who was a colicky child, was too young to go, so father and daughter took off on their big adventure.

They stopped at the drugstore first. Carter bought Lizzie a Coca-Cola while he filled the prescriptions, then he picked her up and carried her, giggling, out to the car.

He'd wanted her to sit in the back, but she wanted to be up front beside him, and he couldn't see the harm in it. Sometimes he'd let her steer the car when they went down the dirt road to his parents' house, but he told her she couldn't do that now, so she sat singing, and Carter couldn't hear “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” for the rest of his life without thinking about that day.

One second they were going down the clay road to Mrs. Haney's with her heart pills, Lizzie singing and her father day-dreaming with one arm hung out the window. The next, he was jamming the brakes instinctively as a buck deer bounded out of the woods just in time to be struck broadside by the green Chevrolet Carter and Marie had bought the year before.

The deer, hit at the peak of his leap, went over the top of the hood and into the windshield. Carter was saved by the steering wheel, but the car was disabled. All he could think to do was scoop up Lizzie's body and run toward the Haneys' house, where there might be a telephone. It was a half-mile, and Carter had to leave his burden beside the road halfway there. It took more than an hour to get an ambulance as far as Carter's broken car, from which point the two men had to walk the quarter-mile to where he'd left his daughter. Carter would always remember and never mention to anyone the bottle flies that were gathering, undisturbed, on her face and arms. They said later that she had died on impact.

Sam told Nancy that his earliest memory was being held by someone other than his mother or father in a large field, with many other people around, and of his mother taking him and saying, “You're all I've got now.”

Carter has never, even for one day, forgotten how his daughter died, the sound her head made as it hit the windshield hard enough to make a perfect little starburst of a dent amid the destruction caused by the incoming deer. He refused to drive for two years after that, told old man Turpin that he'd have to either make his own deliveries or fire him and get another pharmacist.

Carter and Marie never speak to each other about Lizzie. Marie goes out on Lizzie's birthday to put flowers on her grave, which sits near the edge of the Chastain family cemetery, on a long, open hill overlooking the river. Carter goes by later the same day and again at Christmas, when he leaves a wreath and a toy. Sometimes, they're still there in July, when Marie and the other women in the family go to rid the graveyard of thorns and wisteria and empty beer cans. On those occasions, Aileen or Grace might look at the weather-beaten wreath and say, “Reckon Carter's been here,” but Marie lets it pass.

Carter never had more than a two-sentence conversation with Nancy until the day she married his son, and he might not have then, she reflected, if she and her mother hadn't insisted on having at least champagne at the reception.

Carter had never really learned to dance, and Nancy had to almost drag him to the floor, then lead him around it. He'd already had two glasses of champagne, and when the music stopped, he whispered to her, “Thank you. I didn't think I'd ever have another daughter.” And he told her about Lizzie and the emptiness she left.

“I think sometimes we might of spoiled Sam,” he told her. “We wouldn't let him do anything hardly. He had to threaten to run away from home before I'd let him get his driver's license.”

Now, though, Carter will sometimes come by in the middle of the day to “visit” with Nancy and Wade. They'll sit on the back porch, which has a ceiling fan. Nancy has learned to fight the natural instinct to fill the long silences by talking too much. If she stays quiet long enough, she's come to understand, Carter will talk.

He tells her, over the course of a dozen visits from spring through the middle of July, about his family and his town. He talks about Warren, the brother who died in World War I.

“Warren was the smartest one in the family,” he told her one day, with no prelude. “If he had lived, he would of been a lawyer or something. I was lucky I came along when I did.”

He talks, with a little prompting, about how his sisters take care of his brother Lot. Nancy knows that Carter has banned Lot from his home because he said things about religion that upset Marie.

“Lot thinks everybody's a hypocrite except him,” he tells Nancy on one of the rare occasions when he says anything about his only living brother. “You stay away from him. Lot's full of meanness.”

But Nancy knows, too, that Carter goes out to Lot's trailer sometimes, or at least he did before the vision on the barn made it impossible to have a quiet visit.

“Carter's the one that holds things together,” Grace told her one time. “If it wasn't for Carter, I don't know what we'd do.”

Sam has inherited his father's quietness and outward demeanor. Nancy has seen several people at the store call him Carter by mistake, which she finds disquieting. But Nancy doubts that her father-in-law was ever crazy enough to make dunking a basketball his life's ambition.

The sessions sometimes last an hour and a half now. One of Sam's old classmates is the high school basketball coach, and he lets Sam have a key to the gym so that he can go early in the morning to lift weights. He's bought a weight belt, and sometimes he will make several runs at the basket, stopping just short and trying to convert horizontal speed into vertical leap. So far, he can barely touch the rim, and he can't quite lift his own weight from a squat lift.

It doesn't seem to bother Sam that everyone in town knows what he's trying to do and considers it second only to Lot's barn among the highlights of Monacan's summer entertainment. They kid him about it at church, at the drugstore, even when he and Nancy go for walks with Wade late in the evening sometimes.

Sam doesn't talk much about his quest. He does seem to be in better shape, Nancy concedes to herself.

She's seen Buddy once since the reunion in June. One Wednesday evening, she went to the largest of the Richmond malls to shop, and she saw a bank of phones, most of them taken up by teen-agers seemingly intent on keeping them for the night, but a couple on the end were empty. Before she thought about it, she'd taken the number out of her purse and called.

Buddy recognized her voice right away. She was afraid he might not be alone, but he said he was, and that he could be there in 10 minutes, but why not come to his place instead. He gave her the address, and she knew the street. Still not believing herself, she went to the car and found Buddy's townhouse, wondering what she would do if she had car trouble, or an accident, in a part of Richmond where she had no reason to be.

They made love in haste, and Buddy seemed hurt that she had to leave immediately afterward.

“When we were married, you'd rather shoot pool or drink a beer with your friends than do this,” she told him while she fastened her bra.

“You don't know what you got ‘til it's gone,” he said, shrugging. “Like I said, I wish I'd have known you after I grew up.”

She kissed him goodbye with no promises and was back in Monacan by 9:30.

Now, she's not sure. She sees the flaws in Sam through her reacquaintance with Buddy, but she can see that Buddy hasn't achieved sainthood in the years they've been apart, either. The only time she feels guilty about any of it is when she's around Wade, who's just beginning to talk enough so that anyone can understand him.

Between his dunking program and work, Nancy doesn't have as much time with Sam as she'd like. He's more prone to fall asleep in front of the TV, and sex, which wasn't so great anyhow, now suffers by comparison.

She's still resisting working at the drugstore, and she uses the rare free moments when Wade takes a nap to write. She's not sure she'll ever like Monacan. The people, even most of the Chastains, treat her like an outsider, although they don't mind loading her down with duties. She's a part-time Sunday School teacher, an unpaid library aide and a fund-raiser for three different charities. She's expected to bake pies for the volunteer fire department's supper. When she's around other women her age from Monacan, they talk about either old times or soap operas or anybody who isn't there, and she assumes they talk about her behind her back. The word's out that she's trying to be a writer, and that seems to set her apart from her new neighbors even more. She gets into one heated (by Monacan standards) argument with a large-haired woman who's planning to sue the school board if it doesn't drop “Catcher in the Rye” from the high school book list.

“I hope you're not writing trash like that,” the woman says after Nancy tells her what she thinks of book-burners.

“I wish,” Nancy tells her, and then finds out later that she's the Presbyterian minister's wife. Worse yet, Sam wants her to apologize. She tells him to check the farm report.

“When it says that pigs are flying, Sweetie,” she says, “you'll know I've apologized.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Had the dream about the war again, where it's 1917 and I'm shooting them big guns over there, the ones that made my ears bleed, and there's Warren, right next to me, telling me he's all right. Had it the first time a week after they told me he had died in France. Hadn't had it for, I reckon, five years.

Seems like I dream more now, usually the one about fat lightning. Maybe it's because of the barn. Maybe Jesus is trying to tell me something and I ain't smart enough to pick up on it.