Keeping Secrets (44 page)

Jake got.

19

Driving East Again

Emma got, too, right back on the interstate, I-20 headed east, veered over into the left lane, the fast lane, and stayed there. She found herself an eighteen-wheeler convoy and tucked in behind a Peterbilt, sped on past exits to Rayville, Delhi, past the turnoff to Pearl Bank.
Hello, goodbye again, thanks for the memories, J.D.
She was headed for the Mississippi, and an hour and a quarter after she had left West Cypress the tall steel of the Vicksburg Bridge loomed before her. She held her breath.

She’d always done that since the first time she drove across it with Bernie, it sneaking up on them while she was still behind the wheel, and she’d screamed, “No, it’s too high, too long, I can’t do it.”

“Yes, you can, Emma. Just hold your breath.”

What seemed like ten minutes later, for the Mississippi is a
wide
river, she’d grinned and gasped, “Goddamn!” And then a flagman had pulled them over. “Double goddamn!” But it wasn’t a ticket. The piece of white paper he’d handed her was a postcard, preaddressed to President John F. Kennedy. That must have been about 1962.

“Dear Mr. President,” it said. “I want to ask you to cease and desist from your integrationist persecution of the State of Mississippi and to turn your attention to the Communist threat both at our borders and from within.”

She still had that postcard somewhere in the bottom of her bureau drawer along with the little notebook with names inscribed in purple ink, photographs of Helen, love letters from Bernie, somewhere back in the mountain home she shared with Jesse Tree.

Jesse! Jesus, he seemed now like part of someone else’s life. Emma Rochelle What? Why she hadn’t thought about him in…she couldn’t remember when.

Oh, yes, she could, she’d thought about him just a few hours ago when she was sitting on top of the levee with Jake. Didn’t you, Emma? she said to herself. Didn’t you think about telling Jake all about Jesse and asking him what you ought to do about the mess you’ve gotten yourself in, making promises you couldn’t keep, saying yes when you should have said no, didn’t you? But that seemed like days, weeks, years ago. A lifetime ago, before Jake had said…and now that she thought about it, it didn’t seem like the telling would have had much to do with Jesse. Somehow, spilling her secret would have been more about Jake, more about closing old wounds, but Jake had beat her to the punch, hadn’t he, and opened a gap so wide, wider than the Big Muddy she’d just crossed over—why, the gap between them now had no sides. There was no way to bridge them. How could there be connectors when there was nothing to hang them to? Why, the whole idea of her ever trying to make her family whole was a colossal joke. She had no family. Not Rosalie. And now not Jake. Her mother was long buried with the secret of her father’s name. What in the hell
was
her own real name?

Emma looked down at her hands clenched on the steering wheel and realized she had the shakes.

Get hold of yourself, girl. Don’t think about it.

I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.

A pickup truck passed her then, and through the window, just before the gun rack, the man driving turned and looked at her and grinned. You’re talking to yourself, Emma. You’re talking out loud.

The unfamiliar names of Vicksburg streets flashed by her on the interstate.

You’re in Mississippi, Emma. Now what?

She pulled off at an exit sign announcing services.

“Fill her up.”

“Where you headed?” asked the old man in a blue uniform as he wiped dead bugs off her windshield. He looked down at her license tag and back up at her. “You a long way from home. Where you headed?” he repeated.

“Georgia,” she said when she opened her mouth. She listened to the word. It sounded about right.

“You got family there?”

She shrugged, “Used to. My momma was from north of Atlanta. Up near Helen, Tallulah Falls. Tiny place called Meadville. Ever heard of it?”

“Nawh. Cain’t say as I have. I’ll check your oil since you got a far piece to go.”

That done, he stood by the side of her window, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. “So you going to visit kin?”

Emma handed him some money. “I don’t know. I hope so.”

And that was how she decided, since she didn’t know who she was, what she wanted, or what the hell she was doing, to go in search of her mother, to go to Meadville. It was easier than flipping a coin, and she had to do something, she couldn’t just drive in circles, and she was no good at sitting still. Meadville it is, she said, Meadville.

She was tempted when she got within spitting distance early the next morning, having sped across Mississippi, Alabama and part of the state of Georgia, when she pulled into the little town of Helen, to just stop. For she’d turned off the main road to revisit the site where she’d sat shivah for Herman with a bag of tuna fish and crackers and a brace of Jack Daniel’s. The motel where she’d spent that week was still there, but Helen had really flossed itself up, had tacked pseudo-Swiss carpentry onto the front of plain Southern houses, full-blown touristique. Well, she sure as hell wouldn’t have come here to mourn her pseudo-daddy Herman now. Pseudo? Hell, he was as real as any daddy she had.

God Almighty, wasn’t life weird? You thought you had the simple stuff down, like the name of your mother, your father, your
own
name for that matter, then even
that
slipped sideways.

* * *

Meadville is a hamlet perched on a flat space in the north-Georgia hills, anchored, like many small Southern towns, by a square. In the center of that square stands a statue to the memory of the Confederate dead lost in that war that is still referred to by many locals as the Recent Unpleasantness.

Emma drove around the square a couple of times, reading the names written on storefronts and attracting the attention of a trio of old men passing the day on a bench in front of the Piggly Wiggly grocery store.

“California,” one of them said, reading her tags.

“Yep,” answered another.

“That girl’s a long way from home.”

“Might be lost.”

“Might be one of them hoopers selling marijuana. Ain’t that what they call ’em?”

“Trouble’s what I’d call it, young girl being off by herself like that.”

“What you think she wants?”

“Guess you can ask her that yourself, Vern. Here she comes.”

* * *

“Ain’t never heard of no one by that name. And I reckon I’ve lived here most of my life. Helen Kaplan. Nope. No Kaplans.” The men exchanged a look. And then the man who’d answered her shoved back his old straw hat. Beneath it his forehead was white. He stared straight at Emma.

“You think maybe that was her married name?” asked the man on his left.

“No, sir. Her married name was Fine, the same as mine. I mean my maiden name.”

“You married?” asked the third man.

She had to think about that a second. “Yes, yes, I am.”

The man glanced at her left hand. “Don’t wear no rings.”

“No.” Emma shifted her weight from left to right. How did she get herself into these things? She couldn’t lie worth spit. Hadn’t she gotten caught every time it mattered? What she was best at was omission. Yes, leaving things out was the name of her game.

“They don’t wear no wedding rings in California?”

“Well, not everyone does.” She flashed him a big smile, hoping that would get her off the hook. But these were mountain folk, not flatlanders, and they were crusty as old billy goats.

“Everybody does around here, what’s married. Ain’t nobody around here got nothing to hide.”

“Now, he’s full of it,” said the man called Vern. “This rascal’s been married for nigh onto forty years. You see any ring on his tough hide?”

Emma looked down at the man’s hands, which looked like the roots of an upended tree. They bore a lot of dirt but no gold. “Tell you what, boys, we ought to stop wasting this nice lady’s time. You want to know anything about Meadville, you ought to see Miss Carrie.”

“Who’s she?”

“Miss Carrie?” All three of the men laughed. Among them they probably had a complete set of teeth. “Miss Carrie is a retired schoolteacher, sits in the library afternoons now, runs out and grabs children when they go past, tries to force them to take books.”

“She ever succeed?” Emma asked.

“Yep. I reckon she does about eight or nine times out of ten. She’s fast, Miss Carrie. And hard to argue with, once she’s got her mind made up.”

“Where would I find her?”

Vern squinted up at the sun. He didn’t wear a watch.

“Well, you could wait until the library opens at one, or you could go on over to her house.”

“I couldn’t do that,” Emma said.

“Why not?”

“Well, wouldn’t that be rude?”

But if she didn’t, what was she going to do until then? There didn’t seem to be much happening in Meadville other than sitting out in front of the Piggly Wiggly.

“Maybe I could call her on the phone?”

“Now, why on earth would you want to? She ain’t going to know you no better when you go on over there after you’ve wasted a dime. If I was you, I’d just walk down there,” the man gestured down a tree-lined street, the broad-porched houses spaced far apart, “and knock on her front door.”

* * *

“Lord have mercy, child. There’s nothing I like better than some company. And I don’t get much of it around here.”

Emma had already introduced herself and her mission at the door, but before she was half finished, the tall thin still-pretty old woman with the snowy cloud of hair piled atop her head had taken her arm and pulled her inside. Her grasp was strong. Emma could see what the men might have meant about Miss Carrie’s will being difficult to resist. Had she plopped a book into Emma’s hands, Emma would have sat right down and read it.

“Can I get you a glass of iced tea?”

“No, ma’am, that’s—”

“Don’t stand on ceremony, child. If you’ve just come in from the road, you need something to drink.” Miss Carrie was already halfway into the kitchen. Behind her she left the faint scent of lemon verbena.

The living room was filled with a mix of Grand Rapids veneer and Victorian antiques. From her vantage point on a red satin loveseat Emma looked at an inlaid rosewood grandfather clock ticking away in one corner, swinging its brass pendulum. Heavy cream-colored curtains filtered the sun. But the most outstanding feature of the living room was its astounding assemblage of books. They lined the room floor to ceiling in oak bookcases, all of them chockful.

“I see you noticed my books,” Miss Carrie said. She carried a silver tray with a green pressed-glass pitcher, two tall glasses and a china sugar bowl.

“I just can’t stand it when people sweeten my tea, can you?” Miss Carrie said. “Just assuming that you like it that way. I think a body ought to have a choice.”

Emma agreed.

“Well, anyway,
these
are my friends.” The old woman gestured at the thousands of volumes around the room. “They were all strangers, like you, when they first came to call. But now I know them by first name, just like I’ve known all the people of Meadville. Taught them first grade for three generations.”

“Three? Goodness, Miss Carrie, I teach in a junior college, but I can’t imagine doing it that long. I’m already trying to get out.”

“Well, it’s different with you younger folks. You pull up stakes and move on. But back in my time if you grew up a maiden lady like I am, well, you did the best you could, and mostly that meant staying put.”

“You never wanted to go away from here?”

“Why, where would I go? This is where I grew up.”

“You never wanted to see anything else?”

“Oh, child, I don’t mean I
never
left. I went to London and Paris and Rome, Venice and Vienna.”

Emma’s eyes registered surprise.

“Yes. I did. In 1909, my sister and I and two aunts did a grand tour.”

“In 1909?”

“Why, yes. I was born in 1889. That makes me eighty-five this past spring; I’ll save you the trouble of subtracting. Anyway, it was a wonderful trip, but I’d
seen
it then, don’t you know, so I was content to come back home.”

“And you never married? But you’re still such a lovely woman. I can’t imagine.” Oh yes you can, Emma. You mean you just can’t imagine it in her time.

“Even in those days, it took more than being lovely, thank you, to make it work. I always found that a married woman had to have a certain kind of malleability, a disposition to bend to the will of a man, and I just never had that.” Miss Carrie finished her little speech with a lifted chin and pressed lips, as if it was something she’d long ago decided and had repeated many times in the decades since.

“Maybe not all men.” Name three exceptions, Emma. Two. Try one.

“No, not all of them. But most of them are like that, too many to make it likely for a headstrong woman like myself to marry.”

“Was there never anyone?”

Emma thought then perhaps she shouldn’t be so nosy, but Miss Carrie didn’t seem to mind.