Letter From Home (31 page)

The gazebo, which also seemed much smaller and rather shabby now, still stood on the slope of lawn to the south. The war memorials were new to me, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, lines of names carved in granite. I didn't remember the rosebushes on either side of the front steps. But I would never forget the antiseptic smell downstairs in the sheriff's office with the jail cells stretched behind. I knew my memories were erratic, perhaps not to be trusted. I remembered in patches and pieces, some bits of it clear and hard and bright as etched crystal, some murky and dim and impenetrable as lake water.

The letter—I reached in my pocket, touched the envelope—the letter from home had brought so many memories, bright, dark, happy, sad, sharp, blurred. I had not been able to resist the plea in the final paragraph:

 
I pulled down the rim of my glove, looked at my watch. Almost time. I walked across the leaves, my cane poking the winter-hard ground.

Old oaks and elms and cottonwoods stood like sentinels among the graves. The cemetery flowed uphill and down. The Tatum graves were off to my left, not far from Grandmother's grave. I passed by with only a glance. My goal was over the hill, a family plot I'd never visited. I'd received clear directions when we spoke on the phone, both of us a little shocked at the difference in our voices after so many years.

I saw her when I reached the top of the hill. There was a hollow here, a little valley of graves, nestled between two low hills. She waited for me near the new grave, the one still heaped with flowers. The wind had picked up, that old familiar Oklahoma wind, rattling tree limbs, sending leaves and twigs twirling in a chill dance, jouncing the limbs of the cedar behind her. I turned up the collar of my coat. I was hatless, of course, and the wind tugged at my hair. I'd worn a straw hat to Grandmother's funeral. I walked down the slope.

When we faced each other, the mound of flowers between us, we were silent for a moment. Her face held remnants of beauty, despite the puffy pouches beneath her blue eyes, the crinkled skin that told of illness as well as age, the sagging mouth that revealed more clearly than words the loss of hope and joy. Her cloth coat, a rough tweed, was black speckled with gray. The hem dangled loose in front. Her black shoes, blunt and stubby, were fashionable but cheap.

Would I have recognized Barb Tatum? No. Never. Not the Barb who had enthralled our little world, moved with grace, face vibrant, eyes eager.

Barb took a deep breath, clasped her hands together. She had no gloves. Her hands were arthritic, the joints red and swollen. “You look good, Gretchen. Distinguished.”

The words were at such a variance from my appraisal of her that I couldn't answer.

She gave a half laugh, half sigh. “Can't say the same about me, huh?”

I recognized the lilt of Southern California in her words.

I glanced down at the topmost funeral spray, jonquils, their bright yellow blossoms already faded. “I'm sorry, Barb.”

“We have to stop meeting like this.” Her tone was brittle. “Always standing beside a new grave.” Her worn face crumpled. She stifled a sob behind a bunched, reddened hand.

I came around the end of the grave, pulling a Kleenex from my purse.

She took it, swiped at her eyes. “I know Rod's all right. He'd been so sick, Gretchen. Leukemia and they couldn't make it go away. He suffered so bad. He doesn't hurt now. I'm the one who hurts. Not Rod.” She looked at me hopefully. “You being a reporter, I'll bet you checked him out after I wrote. He really is famous.”

“Yes.” Barb's son was famous indeed, known in the small, jealously restricted, snobbish art world for clean-lined acrylic paintings, for sculptures of jagged glass and twisted steel. I'd found a number of biographical sketches of Rodney James Wilson, Jr. There was a beginning, his birth in Long Beach, California, his death in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He'd grown up in our little town in northeastern Oklahoma, living with his grandparents, Buddy's mother and father. Always he'd drawn and painted and sculpted.

Barb leaned down, broke off a jonquil bloom, cradled the wilting blossom in her arms. “Rod asked me once about Mama and Daddy. I got up and left the room. I didn't want him to see my face. Later, there was a painting, a woman in black kneeling before two graves. She didn't have a face, just swirls of black and gray. He never asked again.” Barb brushed loose a yellow petal. It floated lazily down to the leaf-strewn ground, a splash of color against the winter-dried leaves. “I expect Rod knows now. I expect Mama and Daddy were there to greet him along with Buddy and his folks.” Her glance at me was sharp. “Do you think I'm silly?”

My voice was gentle. “Faith is never silly, Barb.”

We looked at each other with sudden understanding, two old women in the autumn of their lives, knowing that those who believe can never explain to those who don't. Should golden radiance spill down over those who scoff, they would brush past, never see, arrogant, impervious, lost.

“Anyway”—Barb cleared her throat—“I know Rod's all right.” She leaned forward, gently placed the flower on the tumbled mass of sprays. “Rod understands. My priest says everybody who dies has to forgive everyone who's hurt them.” Her eyes glistened. “A lot of people had to forgive me, Gretchen. But that's not why I wrote you. See, the whole world thinks Daddy killed Mama and I got to tell the truth before I die. I'm the only one who knows. Oh, Gretchen, can I ever make you see?”

I had a sudden sharp sense of futility. Why had I come? Why had I journeyed across the country, come to this sorrowful place? Barb was seeking an answer long lost in time. I clenched my hand on the knob of my cane. God knows I would help her if I could. But how could she or anyone else change the fact that Clyde Tatum killed his wife and shot himself?

She reached up, those painful fingers tugging at a thick flannel muffler as if it were hard to breathe. “You got to remember how awful it was, finding Mama dead, hearing that she and Daddy quarreled. I couldn't believe Daddy would hurt Mama like that, but finally, like everybody, I thought Daddy was guilty. What else could I think? He was a jealous man and he loved Mama. Maybe he loved her too much. When he heard that a man was coming to our house late at night, what else could he believe but that Mama was having an affair? That was the first awful blow, knowing that Daddy believed Mama was unfaithful. I couldn't sleep for grief. But the second was worse, when Chief Fraser gave me that note that Daddy wrote.”

The note—Mr. Dennis had told us what Clyde wrote. I didn't remember the words now. It had been too many years.

“Then I knew.” The eyes that moved to mine held an agony of pain.

I didn't say anything. What could I say that would help? But why did that note still hurt Barb so much?

“That's why I married Buddy. I had to get out of town. I was so scared. I wanted to tell Chief Fraser, but I knew he'd never believe me.” Her voice was dull with hopeless-ness. “I couldn't prove a thing.”

“Prove what?” I was impatient now. What was there to prove?

“Who killed Mama. And Daddy.” She pulled her purse, the leather faded and worn, from under one arm, opened the clasp. She reached inside, carefully pulled out a plastic folder. She handed it to me.

I held it loosely in my gloved hands. The piece of paper— a scrap from a brown grocery sack—looked old and limp. I strained to read the faded scrawl:

 
That was all. Two sentences, one unfinished, no signature.

I felt an icy prickle down my back. Chief Fraser saw this note, he took it from beneath the slumped body of Clyde Tatum. “Oh, God, Barb . . .” I breathed the words.

“You see. Oh, Gretchen, you see!” Triumph lifted her voice and she almost sounded young.

I willed my hands not to shake. It was as clear as though Clyde Tatum stood there beside us, ever young, his grieving face stubbly with beard, his uniform crumpled and dirty, his smooth muscular arms outstretched.
Fay
. . . Clyde would never have misspelled his wife's name, dropped the
e
. And Barbie . . . ? I'd played at her house so many times. His pet name for his daughter was Sugarbee, sometimes Sugar. Not Barbie. Never Barbie.

I smoothed a gloved finger over the plastic protecting the faded letters. “He wrote it.”

She folded her arms tight across the bulky front of her old tweed coat. “He was telling us.”

Clyde wrote those jerky letters because someone stood with a gun at his head. In his last, desperate seconds, trapped by the man who'd killed his wife, Clyde tried to tell those who would find his body, Chief Fraser and Sheriff Moore and County Attorney Durwood, that he wrote under duress, the gun stolen from his house held inches from his temple. Chief Fraser read right over the spelling of Faye's name. How many people in this world cannot spell, never notice when words are right or wrong? So many. So very many.

Barb shuddered. “He died thinking Mama made love with him. That's the worst part. That's what I can't forget. Or forgive. Daddy never knew it was me.”

Her eyes met mine. It was as though I looked into her soul, weighted with the shackles of shame. “Yes. There was a man coming to our house. But Mama was gone dancing. He came for me, Gretchen, for me. I thought I was so sexy, that it was all so exciting, that he was so handsome. I never thought what could happen. Now it all seems stupid. Everybody screws around.” Her voice was hard, bitter. “Grade school kids even. And Mama died and Daddy died because I was sleeping with Donny Durwood. Oh, God, what a waste.”

I shook my head. “It would matter even now, Barb, a grown man sleeping with an underage girl. Especially a married man.”

“Donny . . . I never saw him again. I wish I could stop hating him.” Her tone was metallic, unyielding. “I doubt he meant to hurt Mama. She was yelling and he got scared. You know, I never thought of him. Not that night. Because Mama had pounded on my door. I locked it when she yelled for me to come out, that she knew what I'd been doing . . .”

Across the years, I remembered Mrs. Crane saying how she told Faye chapter and verse when she called from the Blue Light. . . .

“. . . she was going to find out everything that had happened from me and that there was going to be hell to pay. I guess she called Donny from the Blue Light . . .”

Two calls that terrible night, not one.

“. . . and he came over to try and talk her out of telling anyone. And when she yelled at him, he must have tried to make her be quiet. And he killed her. But Daddy—oh, God, he killed Daddy in cold blood.”

“I saw him that Saturday.” I understood now. Donny Durwood had been clever. Clever and desperate, guilty of murder, but seeing a way to safety, a terrible, agonizing way. Everyone thought Clyde Tatum was guilty. If Clyde committed suicide, leaving a note behind, Durwood was safe. The woman who helped Clyde reach the cabin had become frightened. Perhaps she decided Clyde was guilty, especially after the gun was stolen from the Tatum house. Did she go that sultry night to the town square, hear Donny Durwood's confident accusation? Whatever her motive, she tucked a note beneath the wiper of Donny Durwood's car. It was Durwood who slipped through the darkness of the woods, his scratched arms hidden beneath long sleeves, and awaited Clyde's return from another fruitless effort to find Faye's killer. After he killed Clyde, Durwood placed the note on the police cruiser. I remembered the sense of danger and evil in the darkness that hot summer night.

I spoke slowly. “That morning when they found your dad, Durwood looked sick.” Sick and shaken, distraught, burdened forever. “Barb, there are killers and killers.” I'd covered trials, seen murderers who were stupid or angry or scared or vicious. “Durwood had to care about justice. He would never have become a prosecuting attorney, not even for attention or political gain or power, unless he cared about right and wrong.” What would it do to such a man to become as bad as the criminals he prosecuted?

“Donny drove his car into a tree a few years later.” Barb's voice was cool. “Drunk.” She lifted her chin. “I was glad. It made it better somehow that he was dead. That's when I could look at Rod and not see Donny.”

“Rod?” I had printed out a good deal of material about the gifted artist. There was a studio portrait that hung in a gallery. A self-portrait. Blond hair, broad face, a handsome man.

Barb's lips trembled. “I told you I was bad, didn't I? That everything was my fault? I had to get married. I was pregnant.” Tears slid down her cheeks unchecked. “But maybe that was the only good I ever did. Having Rod. Letting Buddy's parents take him. They loved him, you know. Loved everything he did, everything he said. He was Buddy's boy and then when he became an artist, it was like they were farmyard chickens and there was a peacock among them. That's why I never could say anything. I couldn't do that to Rod. Or to Buddy's folks. But they're gone now. Whatever I say now can't hurt them. I guess I'm looking for peace, Gretchen. And I thought of you.” Barb brushed back a tangle of dyed red hair. “I was afraid you wouldn't come. You didn't have to.”

“No. I didn't have to come.” There isn't much a woman my age has to do. It's easy to say no. But when the letter arrived, I'd just returned from a family holiday in Hawaii. We'd stayed on Kauai, splashed in the surf, played tennis, picnicked, run with the children across golden sand. My children and grandchildren came as my guests. I thrust my gloved hand into my coat pocket, felt the letter and looked down at the spray of jonquils, their fading yellow blossoms a harbinger of the spring yet to come. It was simply a holiday, but a holiday made possible by my working years. I never forgot how my career began. I still have the yellowed clips of the story I wrote about Faye Tatum, the story that I carried with me to California and to the future.