Lovesick (19 page)

“All it took was a jab,” Jewel says, balling up her fist. “To her belly. I hated that little slut. And to think you would imagine you could . . . Never! A jab. And then . . .”

“You are a lying bitch. I will never forgive you this!”

“I killed her. As sure as I am standing here. By myself. I planned it. Day by day. No one knew. Not even you. Hell, you even went to the store to buy me some Dairyland. A little bit in her grits. In her eggs. In her fig preserves. Just enough so that when it was time for the baby, she would have bled out. Easy as that. Over and done with. But you would not wait for that. You forced my hand.”

“No,” says Freddie. “It isn't true. It cannot be true. If I thought it was true, I would sell my share of the farm and leave here forever, and you can talk yourself to death, you stupid, vain cow.”

“Believe me or not,” says Jewel. “She is still dead and buried.”

“Why are you telling me this? Don't you know that I could do worse to you than what I did to him?”

“I am not afraid of you. Any more than you should be afraid of me.”

“Why didn't you just kill me as well? Then you and Mr. Odom could have lived here without any bother. I wouldn't be here to spoil it for you.”

“You don't understand at all. We had an agreement, Freddie. You are my sister—and we had an agreement between us. I was prepared—am prepared—to honor that. I cannot confess to understand what it was you felt for that girl, but it did not fit into our plans. Just like I knew that I could not keep Conrad here forever. But there is no way I could allow you to have her here.”

“Allow me?”

Jewel reaches over and picks up the teacup and saucer, holding them out in her hands. “Allow you. Just like I allow you to drink from this stupid cup every morning. This damned saucer.” She leans over close to Freddie, the cup and saucer between them. “You know, every morning I get up and I want to smash these precious pieces of yours to bits.”

“They don't bother you,” says Freddie. “They have nothing to do with you.”

“I hate them. I hate them simply because you love them so much. I hate them because they mean something to you. Something that belongs only to you. But I do not smash them. I allow you to drink your coffee out of the goddamn saucer like a field hand every morning. I allow you to put on your work pants and your work boots and your men's shirt and stomp around the field. Because you are my sister and we made an agreement that this would be our life together. But you cannot change that agreement without my consent.” She raises her left hand, which holds the saucer, as if to toss it against the wall. “Do you understand me?”

A sharp knife cuts behind Freddie's eyes and she winces with the pain. Her ears ring with faraway bells. Bees bite at her fingertips and toes.

“Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” Freddie cries. “Yes, I understand. What I don't understand is why people can be so cruel.”

“To get what we want,” replies Jewel. “To endure the atrocities that life thrusts upon us. Now, I am going to make breakfast. I will call you when it is ready. Then we are going to drive into Florence and I am going to shop for new linens. And when I am done, we will have lunch at the Skyview. And then we will come home.” She puts the cup and saucer on the table next to Freddie. Freddie ponders them for a moment; forgotten objects from a museum they seem to her.

Freddie climbs out of her chair with difficulty. She cannot breathe. The sunlight scorches her eyes and the ringing in her ears has turned to a shrill, piercing alarm. She lumbers down the stairs and across the yard with only one thought in her mind—to throw herself onto Isabelle's grave, to beg her forgiveness. For bringing her here. For wanting her to stay. For thinking that things could be different.

But she does not even make it to the edge of the yard before the ground melts beneath her and swallows her like a molten green lake. The grass fills her mouth. She feels the pulse of the sunlight in her veins. She watches sideways as an ant crawls up her arm. When she tries to shake it off, she discovers she has turned to stone.

7

Freddie lives for twelve years after her stroke, dying in 1965. Jewel does not move her to a rest home as many would have done, but keeps her at the house, hiring a full-time nurse to attend to her. Accommodations have to be made, of course. There is no way to carry her from one level to the next, so Freddie's bedroom is moved downstairs into what had been the dining room. Jewel takes over the larger bedroom for herself. The nurse sleeps in the room where Isabelle had died.

The stroke leaves Freddie paralyzed completely on her left side. If she can speak, no one knows, since she does not. If she is able to see, to understand, no one can tell since she does not respond. The nurse tells her friends that Jewel is a dutiful, doting sister. She insists on feeding Freddie at every meal, talking to her in soft, soothing tones. And in the morning, she makes her coffee for her, and after the nurse has wheeled Freddie to her resting spot in the parlor or the kitchen or the porch, Jewel brings it to her and holds the mug—which reads,
WORLD
'
S BEST SISTER
—to Freddie's lips until she has finished every drop.

The nurse drives Jewel wherever she needs to go—to Lur-delle's, to church, to her committee meetings. Jewel also has Mr. Ray's work crew construct a ramp from the kitchen steps so the nurse can push Freddie to the car so she can accompany them on their outings.

One such event is the dedication of the Bramble window at the Christ the Shepherd Methodist Church. The women of the Stained Glass Committee put forth a petition to name the window in honor of Jewel and her family since she has experienced more hardship than a good Christian should have to. As an expression of her appreciation for this gesture, Jewel increases her donation by $2500. Jewel gives the nurse some money to buy a new dress for the dedication ceremony, and on the day, the nurse wheels Freddie down to the front of the church so she can sit next to Jewel, who has the place of honor in the front pew.

There is a great celebration in her honor, and a covered dish dinner afterward in the reception hall. During the dedication, the preacher says many kind things about Jewel, about her willingness to help those in need. He makes special mention of her kindness in tending to her infirm sister, and those sitting close enough swear they can see a tear flow down Freddie's cheek.

Jewel lives for over twenty years after Freddie's death, dying in 1987. By then, she has sold off nearly all the land to a developer who plans to build a country club and golf course residences for people in Morris. He even consents to calling the development Bramble Estates, so people will know it had been part of the farm. As for the house, she gifts that to the State Historical Society with the provision they maintain the house and grounds for visitors.

But for all her good works and donations, Jewel cannot fend off the punishing march of age, and she ultimately has to be taken to a private nursing home in Florence, when she is found by her caretaker one morning wandering without her nightgown out on the highway. When she is coherent, Jewel tells everyone that she hates the place, hates the food, wants to go home. In her less lucid moments, she weeps for Freddie, a name that means nothing to the people at the nursing home, who assume Freddie must be the name of a dead husband or child.

When she dies, Jewel is returned to the Bramble Farm, as it is known by everyone in the low country of South Carolina. Most of her friends from Christ the Shepherd Methodist Church have died or are in nursing homes themselves, and she is buried next to Freddie in a simple ceremony attended only by the funeral home staff. Her tombstone is identical to Freddie's, with only her name and dates of birth and death to mark the difference. And there they lie, side by side, to this very day.

Sandra and the Snake Handlers

1

Before Carson's death, if you had asked Sandra to explain how the universe worked, she might have told you that we are all connected in the mind of God, each of us to one another, not in a way that you can see really, but more like the way you can trace the outline of a shape using the stars. See, there is a fish. There, balanced scales. It took imagination and faith to believe. And not simply that we are connected to each other, but to everything—to ourselves. So that if you could somehow manage to draw your finger from one event in her life to another, you could sketch the outline of her being—see how she fit into the whole scheme of things. However, if you were to ask her the same question after Carson's death, she would probably have told you to go fuck yourself—or that you better learn that God loved no one, no thing, and His creation was nothing more than a festering puncture in the empty sky, waiting to swallow us whole. So was she changed by her husband's death.

It was staggering really, the way Carson's death caught Sandra totally off her guard. Sure, she understood that people died—she wasn't a nitwit after all—she had studied to become a LPN before she married, and even worked at a nursing home. And since Carson would have been sixty-two the next month, they had attended plenty of funerals for men younger than he. Still, the reality of his death was stunning, like the hailstorm that came without warning and destroyed her hydrangea bushes last August. People had called that freakish, a caprice of nature. Carson's death, they told her, was God's will. Take your pick. She couldn't see any difference between the two.

The way it happened was like this. It was the year after Hurricane Floyd and all the terrible flooding that followed. Sandra and Carson had not evacuated. They never did. She always had plenty of canned goods in the pantry, and there was a generator in the garage if the power went out. They had lived long enough along the coast to know what to do, how to prepare. They had weathered plenty of storms together: Diana and Hugo. They both remembered Hazel as well, though Sandra was still a young girl and lived with her family in the mountains when that storm had struck. Still, this was different. Floyd was a slow-moving storm, so there was plenty of time to anticipate and prepare. At church on the Sunday before, there had been plenty of talk about when and where the storm might come ashore. A group of men agreed to meet on Tuesday to board up the Bramble stained glass window if the storm's course hadn't changed. Helen Hobbs said she would host a group for a vigil to “pray the worst of it up the coast.” Sandra thought that seemed mean-spirited and petty—why should they benefit from someone else's misery? She did not want to believe that God worked like that. But that had been before.

On The Weather Channel, Floyd covered a space the size of Texas, and what no one predicted was the torrential, unrelenting rain. It began early on a Thursday morning, the sky deep and terrible, trembling with wind and thunder. For hours they sat as the rain began—hard, fierce, angry. She imagined Noah's family sitting in the ark, waiting for the skies to open and wash away the sins of the world. How hard that rain must have been. How long that rain must have lasted. But she knew what Noah and his family had lived through could have been no more awful than this—it was as if God Himself was pelting the earth. It came in waves, hard sheets of water blowing sideways through the trees. They had covered all the windows with plywood, and when the power failed just after noon, they sat in the gray twilight, Carson fiddling the dials of the transistor radio to get the latest updates. Often there was a snap of a tree limb cracking away from the trunk; occasionally, the crash of a whole tree coming down. What they couldn't see were the tree trunks that had uprooted themselves and lodged in the drainage pipes next to the highway so that the rushing water could not pass through. It didn't take long for the water to begin to rise. Higher and higher it came, over the roads, over the driveways, up into the yard. When Carson opened the door to get a glimpse and cast the flashlight over the front yard, it was as if their house sat marooned in the middle of a giant murky lake. Off in the distance, Sandra could see her patio furniture drifting away in the dark.

It was three days before they could leave the house. Even after the rain stopped, it took a long time for the water to recede. When they finally ventured out, they discovered cushions and chairs and couches washed up along the sides of the road like debris from a shipwreck. Sandra would never forget the dead pigs—swollen and bleached along the creek bank near the house. The news told them to boil all the water and to be careful and watch for snakes. There was a story that one woman had found a nest of moccasins living in her oven when she returned from evacuating. The thought of snakes terrified Sandra.

Carson had hugged her and told her that once again God had spared them. There was damage, but nothing they couldn't repair. They were luckier than so many others. How wrong he was.

The men from FEMA and the State Department of Transportation, officious sorts with large bellies slung over ill-fitting pants, men consumed by their new sense of importance, came by to tell them that they needed to widen their drainage ditch—so that the next time there was a storm, the water could flow more easily. Sandra knew that was just so much nonsense—when there was that much water, it did not matter how large the hole was for it to go into, it would still overflow and flood. They left measurements with Carson and told him the backhoe would be around in a week or two.

When the backhoe arrived, it dug a trench that was nearly seven feet deep at least and as wide as it was deep. Sandra never minded the new ditch. In fact, it gave her an odd sense of security to have the separation from their house and the highway. It reminded her of a moat, like in the stories of castles and knights. But Carson wasn't pleased one bit. He said it was a scar on the land. That it ruined their property value. “Might as well be living in a trailer with a bunch of tires painted white to mark the driveway. That damn thing is good for only one thing—a pit for every piece of trash to dump their cans and bottles.” So, he hired a second-year student in turf management from the community college to come over and instruct him how to blend the ditch into the landscape. Which he did. It took another backhoe and two extra workmen a solid day to even out the ditch so that it became a part of the total fabric of the place, and Carson was pleased with the result. But the incline was still steep and the ditch was over six feet deep at its center.

The day of the accident, a Saturday, Carson was out riding his Toro Lawn Master just like he did every weekend. He was deeply proud of their home and the four and a half acres surrounding it. He had spent the better part of the year restoring and improving the house and the yard after the hurricane so that what damage had been done had been erased. Shaded by pecan and dogwood trees, the house itself was a modest, three-bedroom brick ranch, set back from Highway 905 at the end of a long gravel driveway. Flowering shrubs and plants rotated in the beds along its border—azaleas and agapanthus in the spring and summer, mums and pansies in the fall, purple-frilled ornamental cabbages in the winter. Sandra would have preferred to have lived in Bramble Estates, where you had neighbors close by, but Carson said there were too many rules there, and he didn't want anyone telling him what he could do with his own land. They had plenty of room out back for a vegetable garden as well, and Carson kept the portion of the property that was lawn manicured like an enormous putting green.

He was mowing out near Highway 905, which ran in front of the house, and doing long, lazy sweeps in and out of the new gully. When she stood on the front porch, Sandra could watch him ride the mower down the slope—he would disappear from sight as if the earth were swallowing him and the mower whole, only to reappear in a different spot with a wave of his hat like an explorer just returned from a trip to the earth's core.

But on that Saturday, as Carson angled in and out of the trench, he spied a beer bottle in his path, thrown there undoubtedly by some of the redneck teenagers at the high school who had nothing better to do than get drunk and destroy property or litter. So he stopped the mower, climbed off, and deposited the bottle into the Hefty bag he kept on hand just for such purposes. The problem came when Carson went to get back on the mower. He had parked parallel, so that his wheels were running in the same direction as the embankment rather than against it. As Carson got back onto the mower, the whole thing just tumbled over on top of him, like a child going head over yonders on a tricycle.

He didn't even come to the house straightaway. Sandra hadn't been watching him at that moment. She had been inside, happy as a clam, ignorant as a goose, re-creating a recipe from Miss Virginia's
South of the Rio Grande,
a Mexicana chicken casserole to take to a potluck dinner at church. If she had been watching, she would have called 911, she told herself later, and things might have been different. But she hadn't been watching, and so he righted the mower, climbed on, and finished his work. When he finally did come up to the house, he told her what had happened, that he felt like a durn fool for making such a stupid, careless mistake, and said he had a terrible stiff neck and a pain in his shoulder, could she please put some Deep Heat rub on it. He adamantly refused to go to the doctor.

“Doctors are for when you are sick,” he said, “and I am not sick. I've just pulled something is all.” But on the Tuesday following, when he wasn't feeling any better, he relented and made an appointment to see the chiropractor in Morris. She fussed and fumed, saying he needed a real doctor just this once, but Carson believed that a little poking and prodding of his muscles and a good quick snap of his neck was all he needed to make him 100% again.

She had never understood Carson's fascination with chiroprac-tory (“chiro-quackery,” she called it), but she figured it probably had something to do with his downright fear of needles. She had seen him go white as a sheet and keel over at a Red Cross Blood Drive once, and if there was ever a medical show on with an operation or where they were giving a shot to someone, he would change the channel quick as a wink or hurry off to the kitchen for a glass of water. He said having regular spinal adjustments was all he needed to keep fit, and she had to admit, they seemed to work for him. Carson was a strapping, healthy man—full-chested, muscular, with big arms and a thick coating of hair across his upper torso and stomach. She let him go to the chiropractor.

The night after his appointment he told her he felt better but complained of a slight headache and said his vision was fuzzy. He didn't eat all the dinner she had made for him—salmon croquettes with cucumber-dill sauce—and went to bed before the late news. The TV picture was hard to focus on, he said, and it was making him nauseous to look at it.

The next morning during his bowel movement, he fell off the toilet onto the bathroom floor. This time she did call 911, but it was no use. They told her at the hospital Carson had an embolism in his shoulder area, which had most likely been dislodged by the chiropractic adjustment. The strain of trying to move his bowels threw the blood clot to his brain—he was dead before he hit the floor.

She never realized how much she depended on Carson, how empty her life was without him. Sandra felt utterly lost and abandoned. This was not the way things were supposed to go. She had put in her time, lived a good, upstanding life—in her opinion, the sums did not balance out.

In the days and weeks after the funeral, anger propelled her. It was her only fuel. She was angry at the chiropractor for his negligence. She was angry at the attorney for telling her that she had no legal recourse against the chiropractor. She was angry for how her friends hovered around her when she wanted to be left alone with her grief and for how they neglected her when she needed the comfort of their company. She was angry at Carson for being so set in his ways. Angry at herself for all the things she had not done for him. But most of all she was angry at God. She had served God all her life, attended church regularly, been recording secretary for the Women's Society of Christian Service for three years in a row, and always contributed to any bake sale to raise funds for the youth group or for mission work. It was not fair that she be repaid like this.

One night, she rolled the Toro Lawn Master from the tool shed Carson had built adjoining the garage. She could not bring herself to sit on the mower and drive it, and it took nearly all her strength to push it out behind the house to the edge of the vegetable garden. If anyone could have seen her as they drove past on Highway 905, she reckoned they would have thought her mad, rushing around in her nightclothes in the middle of the night, barefoot, her hair uncombed, unkempt. She soaked the mower with gasoline and, standing back, flicked a lighted match in its direction. That was all that was needed. The mower ignited with a
whumpf,
and as she shielded her face from the heat of the blaze, she looked to the dark, moonless sky. She thought how in India and other, nonChristian countries, wives would often throw themselves onto the blazing funeral pyre. Whereas once she would have thought such an act to be irrational or uncivilized, now it did not seem entirely without logic or merit to her.

“You wanted a sacrifice,” she said. “Here is your burning altar, you son of a bitch.” She left the mower smoldering in the backyard, unconcerned if it burned the garden or the yard or the whole damn house as far as she cared. The next morning, when Peggy Adcock called to say she and her husband, Donald, had seen what they thought was a fire coming from the direction of her house, was she okay, Sandra told her to mind her own damn business, to take care of her husband, and to leave her alone.

 

The hardest thing to get used to was cooking for one. It broke her heart just to think of having to halve the recipes that she made every night for Carson and herself—Meatloaf Surprise, chicken divan, stuffed flank steak. She could not bear to do it. Even worse was the concept of leftovers. Packing his uneaten portion into Tupperware for the following night. That made it seem to her that Carson was away on some interminable business trip—while she was left behind, dutifully stockpiling food, always waiting, waiting, waiting for his return.