Missing May (6 page)

But when he started talking about the capitol, I knew it was only nerves.

"I never have seen it," he told Ob. "Only a black-and-white picture in our West Virginia history book. Even that knocked my socks off.

"I just think about all those important people, making laws under that gold dome. It must be to West Virginia what the Parthenon was to the Greeks."

Cletus shook his head and stared out the window toward the Du Pont plant we were passing.

"It's got to be the greatest thing," he said, "to work in the West Virginia capitol every day."

And for a second, right then, I had this strong image of Cletus someday doing that very thing. Of his being Fayette County's elected representative to the legislature and driving over to Charleston to put his head together with other important heads and enact profound laws.

Then I remembered that he liked to eat Vienna sausages from the can and watch reruns of "Laugh- In," and came to my senses.

The green-and-white road signs kept teasing us along with mentions of Capitol Street so many miles ahead, and we strained our eyes for a glimpse of the gold-leafed dome, like Columbus looking for a continent.

Then ... there it was, and I know it was better than all three of us figured it would be. The capitol building sprawled gray concrete like a regal queen spreading out her petticoats, and its giant dome glittered pure gold in the morning sun. I felt in me an embarrassing sense of pride that she was ours.

That we weren't just shutdown old coalmines and people on welfare like the rest of the country wanted to believe we were. We were this majestic, elegant thing sitting solid, sparkling in the light.

Ob kept running the car off the road as he tried to drive and look at the same time.

"Sure is a beauty," he said as he pulled the car back into the lane for the third time.

"Sure is," I heard Cletus answer. The boy looked like he was just swallowing up the sight, gulping that capitol down as fart as he could as we moved on past it, on toward I-64. I knew he wanted to stop right then and stay there, maybe forever. Forget that Bat Lady.

Ob probably knew it, too.

"Don't you folks worry," he said. "Tomorrow when we come back this way, we're going to stop and spend the whole day wandering that place.

We'll see us some historical documents and some genuine West Virginia artifacts. Then we'll go have us some lunch with the senators and maybe even the governor himself in the capitol coffee shop.

"Me and Cletus, we'll tell him how to straighten out all his mess."

So as Cletus pinned his eyes to that place he thought might just be heaven, our car kept on moving, out of view of the fine gold dome, further apart from Deep Water and the people we used to be there, on nearer Putnam County and the people we were about to become. Three visitors heading for Oz.

CHAPTER TEN

"The Reverend Miriam Young has passed on I'm afraid.

We were standing on the porch of the little blue house that used to be the Spiritualist Church of Glen Meadows when we heard these awful words.

And all three of us, I'm sure, felt for a moment like just passing on with her.

We'd found the place without any trouble. Drove the main highway in, stopped at a filling station and checked a phone book, and by 10:00 A.M. we were on the Reverend Young's front porch. Or what used to be hers.

There was no sign outside the home advertising it as a church, but Ob said, getting out of the ear, that it wasn't the kind of religion people necessarily advertised. He said it wasn't what you'd call Welcome Wagon material. And Cletus made some joke about the church not needing a sign anyway because everybody who was supposed to come most likely heard of it telepathically anyway. But I wasn't so optimistic. I was always set for failures since May died, and I was set for this one.

"Passed on where?" Cletus asked the man like a fool.

Smiling kindly to the imbecile in our company, the chipmunk of a man (that's the animal he favored) said, "She died, son. Last June. She's passed on to the Spirit World."

We three just stood there dumbfounded. We were trying to outwit Death on this trip, rise above it, penetrate the blockades it put up between us and May. We were coming to Putnam County to put Death in its place, and instead it had put us squarely back in ours.

"So who are you?" I asked brazenly, forgetting my manners. I had nothing left to lose anyway. I was mad at this chipmunk and ready to fight. Ready to squeeze that Bat Lady right out of him.

But his face never altered as he looked into my eyes. He smiled again, again kindly, and he said,

"I am Miriam's nephew, dear. I'm living here until I get her affairs in order."

"Oh."

I couldn't think of anything else to say.

Then Cletus said, "Where are the bats?"

The chipmunk chuckled. He said, "Flying free, son. Like the Reverend Young herself."

All this time Ob had said nothing. He hadn't even been facing us. As soon as he'd learned Reverend Young was dead, he had turned away and looked off the side of the porch, rubbing his forehead as he always did when he was lost and searching for a way to go.

But after the feeble attempts of Cletus and me to deal with this house empty of its Small Medium at Large, he turned back. Turned back and in a quiet voice said to the man. "I was hoping she could help me contact my wife. I needed to talk to my wife."

And the nephew of the preacher Ob had needed so desperately to find looked an Ob's heart broken face and saw his pain and he reached out and put a hand on Ob's shoulder.

"I am so sorry, sir, but I haven't my aunt's spiritual powers. There is no one else here. But I do know someone, a man in Sissonville, who might be able to.. ."

But Ob put up his hand and shook his head.

"No," he said. "No. We were led here, and here my looking ends. I can't go traipsing through the state like some old fool, searching out psychics. I'm not meant to do it and I won't."

Cletus looked at me and I looked at him, both of us hoping for the other one to do something.

Then Cletus said, "Well, sir, do you have any materials you might give us?

Anything she might have used in church?" Leave it to Cletus to think of that.

Wanting something to take, something to hold between his fingers, to hide away in his vinyl suitcase. Cletus always needing something to collect.

"Well," said the nephew, "there is the church brochure the Reverend always handed out to new-comers. I could give you one of those."

Cletus nodded his head.

The nephew looked over at Ob.

"Would you care to come inside while I look? Could I offer you a cup of coffee?"

But Ob shook his head and remained silent. His face was pale and full of strain, and I wanted to take his suffering from him. But all I could do was wait for the chipmunk and Cletus to take care of their business so we might just go on home.

The nephew reappeared at the door with a folded white paper in his hands.

He again apologized sorrowfully, wrote his number on the paper in case he could ever be of any help to us, and then the door that had held so much hope was closed and we were back on our own again.

We walked silently to the Valiant, then sat there a few minutes without a word. I was waiting for Ob to decide what he was going to do next. We had already called up our reservations at the one motel in town. Then tomorrow--

after the Reverend Young would have connected Ob to May and everything was finally set right--tomorrow we were supposed to drive to the capitol.

Spend the whole day there hobnobbing with the legislators. And then we were to go home and maybe live again.

But it was only eleven o'clock in the morning, we had been on this journey only three hours, and already everything was cracked and broken--and some of us with it.

Ob gave a deep sigh and he said, "I guess we better head on home, children."

He started the car, and slowly we pulled away from all the spirits resting in that little blue house. Cletus and I said nothing. I guess we both knew it was too delicate a situation for fixing.

Unlike the happy silence we'd all enjoyed earlier that morning, we suffered instead a black kind of stillness on our route back home. Ob looked awful. I thought he might just pull the car over to the shoulder and die. Cletus opened up the Spiritualist hand out and stared at the page mile alter mile. And I watched out my window, swallowing back the lump in my throat and praying for something to save Ob and me. For I truly felt Ob had taken his final punch.

Off of I-64 and back on the turnpike, the signs for Capitol Street started cropping up again. I could feel Cletus lift his eyes and watch them slide past.

And before long, there she was. That pretty concrete queen Cletus wanted to marry someday.

We traveled the road up the river alongside her, and no one said a word.

My heart was aching for Cletus, for I knew there was little in life he really wanted this bad, this chance to see the West Virginia State Capitol. But I had nothing left to try to get it for him. We headed on south toward the bridge that would take us across the river and as far away from Cletus's capitol as any soul could be. Back to Deep Water, where life would become again an empty trailer, an old man's declining will to go on, a crazy fool believing in the mysteries of a beat up vinyl suitcase, and me. I kept my eyes straight ahead, unwilling to look behind me at that gold shining dome that had accepted all our deepest wishes just a few hours back. Then just as we were nearly out of its sight, just as we were ready to put that last disappointment behind us and go back to the old life, we heard Ob say, "I'm turning this buggy around"

And he did. He turned that buggy around and he drove it back the way we'd come. Back toward that shining castle. My heart began to hit. And Cletus leaned forward from the backseat.

Sounding almost too scared to ask, he said, "Are we going anyway, Ob?

Going in to see it?"

Ob said. "It's getting on to lunchtime. I figure the governor will be in the coffee shop, watching for somebody interesting to come through the door."

Ob straightened his shoulders, and his face eased up a little, and he said,

"We sure don't want to disappoint him."

CHAPTER ELEVEN

May always said we were angels before we were ever people. She said when we were finished being people we'd go back to being angels. And we'd never feel pain again.

But what is it that makes a person want to stay here an this earth anyway, and go on suffering the most awful pain just for the sake of getting to stay?

I used to think it was because people fear death. But now I think it is because people can't bear saying good-bye.

May was lucky. When she had to say her goodbye to Ob, she had to hurt over it only once. And then she was an angel and it didn't hurt her anymore.

But Ob. Ob hurt and he kept on hurting. Living in a trailer full of May's empty spaces. Walking through May's dying garden. Sleeping in a bed that still left room for her.

He hurt so much. But even after his most terrible hours, he decided to stay here on this earth. Right out of the blue, he wanted to live again. And I'd like to think maybe he wanted to live because of me. Because he couldn't bear the thought of saying good-bye to me.

Something happened to Ob that day we left Putnam County and started back for home. Between the front porch of the late Reverend Young's and the concrete steps of the West Virginia State Capital, something happened to Ob to make him long for living again. I don't know what it was. I couldn't even take any credit for making it happen when it did. I figured Ob had given up there on that porch in Putnam County and I was preparing myself for the worst. But something happened to Ob. He turned that buggy around.

The three of us found an easy place to park right beside the capitol building and we got out of the car and walked into that place like three people coming home. We didn't feel small. We didn't mind that we were new. We felt embraced and even sort of expected.

Cletus seemed to need to touch everything. Even when we walked down the halls, he'd run his fingers lightly against the walls. We stopped at every lighted display window. We read the name on every door. We picked up every brochure. And Cletus smiled at each person we passed as if he knew everyone well.

And all this time Ob was gentle with him and with me, gentle like a mother. He would lean with Cletus over a glass case in the museum, and his arm would lie softly about Cletus's shoulders as they read the words off an old yellowed newspaper. And while I stood in front of a beautiful window, looking out at the capitol lawn with its pigeons and squirrels and pretty women walking together and laughing, Ob would stand beside me and rest his palm against the back of my head as he used to when I was a little girl.

In the capitol coffee shop we looked for signs of the governor, but I guess he was off somewhere else that day. So we just eavesdropped on the conversations of all the other men and women in their nice suits, people who had come downstairs from their big offices with leather chairs to have a cup of capitol coffee and relax. Cletus watched them with a kind of ache in his eyes, and I knew what he wanted for his life and I prayed for him to some day get it. But I didn't say any prayers for me. I was too afraid to hope for things. We went through every bit of space in the capitol building that we could find: then we went next door to the Science and Culture Center and soaked in all of that place, too. There was a gift shop there selling handmade items by West Virginians, and it was Cletus who said that Ob ought to be bringing in his whirligigs to sell. I could see that Ob actually gave it some thought. He looked around the shop like somebody planning out a garden they're about to plant. He'd stare at one comer, then another, like he was setting up his whirligigs there, in his head, getting the feel of it.

But when we walked out of the shop, Ob said to Cletus, "My 'gigs are needing a place, This ain't it."

We stayed among the senators and legislators until five o'clock, and when they started heading out to their cars to go home, we called the Glen Meadows Motel to cancel; then we headed on out to ours. I gave Cletus the front seat.