Pay the Piper (28 page)

One guest was a widely respected planter who was known as a patron of the arts; she could already wish she'd met a Delta man like him. He was the only person who had ever spoken to her about her own work, or Mrs. Perry's: the only person who seemed to understand she'd had another life. She never saw him again; he refused an invitation to a dove hunt, saying he'd like to have talked to her further. Then she knew, too, the divisiveness that was here about Hal. Walter Harold Sills sat down and asked, “What's Hal going to do now that he's back?” She repeated things she was told. “His equipment was sold. It's too expensive to buy more and start over at his age. Do you think so?”

“It is for Hal. Because he's never known anything about farming.” Then Walter stood up. “But I guess he never had anybody to teach him. Mr. MacDonald's never known anything about it either.”

How instantly all her ideals about the MacDonalds had been shattered. At dinner Hal was persuaded to take wine. He held her hand. But on his other side a woman said how cute he looked with crinkly lines he'd developed around his eyes. The host said during dinner, “There's a silent majority in the United States deprived of a hearing, because the big communications media are in the hands of a lunatic fringe of leftist liberals. Most of them in New York.”

She silently toasted her old friends back at Events-Empire, William's co-workers. A guest used his starched place mat to wipe his greasy chin; the napkin was too damned little, he said. He'd also said at her house, “Hell, no,” he didn't want a cup of tea when she offered one. He and Hal had come in from hunting. Nobody cared he wadded the place mat and wiped his hands. This difference was what she had come for, she thought. The time Hal wrote he had been chairman of the local Republican party, she had said,
You probably voted for Ike
! He replied,
Of course
,
and for Strom Thurmond, Dewey, and Herbert Hoover
. So much seemed funny then, he seemed more astute. She assumed she didn't seem the same as in her letters either. She wrote about the day Kennedy was shot, saying she had rushed to the school bus to tell Rick in a gentle way. He said, “I know. The bus driver announced it. All the kids clapped.” Hal wrote that Soundport sounded like the kind of town he'd like.

She rode home from that dinner party, beneath the canopy of Delta sky, feeling so soon tricked and cheated that her husband and his father were not respected planters and, worse, friends of her husband's thought him stupid.

Hal had not played tennis since the summer his older daughter started beating the shit out of him. Laurel cried out “Good!” about his shots, wishing there was not a reversal of roles and that he was the coach as William had been. She remembered how a young tennis instructor once told her she was stupid. She stayed rooted to one spot, never thinking to trick or outwit him, to place a shot beyond his reach. She went on steadily returning balls to him in a direct, honest manner. Her stepdaughters had come to visit and she found it difficult being stepmother to two girls with different mothers. There was naturally animosity on Connie, the older girl's, part. Tina was entirely unaware of it. At dinner, on one visit, Connie talked of being a child in Swan, and Tina said, “Oh, you used to live here?”

“Yes, Tina,” said Connie. “I used to live here.”

What she did not understand was Hal's being entirely unconscious of the nuances in the conversation. He had never realized Connie did not like Sallie, he said. “She wouldn't mend my clothes when I was a kid and tore them,” Connie said. Now Laurel used up all her energy seeing Tina had a good time when she was here. Girls were different. They were always washing long flowing hair and drying it just when it was time to go somewhere. Hal made a disparaging remark about Sallie's drinking one night, and Tina was in tears. “Momma doesn't drink. She might just have one on the board when she's ironing in the morning.” She thought it remarkable the child had any innocence left. She thought of Carla and Sallie, put out into the world alone by Hal and unprepared; like most girls she grew up knowing, they went directly into marriage from living with their parents and had never even held a job. When Tina said, “Momma says you'll be good for Daddy, but he won't be good for you,” she had felt a compassion Sallie had for her. “Promise me, Laurel,” Tina said. “You'll never leave me overnight in the house with my father. I'm not supposed to be here if he's drinking.”

“I promise.” She would not report the truth to Sallie if Tina wanted that much to see her father, and she did not wish to cause a rift in her marriage.

Rick came every vacation. She would never stop being grateful. What would she do without those times? William had married a woman with several teenagers, and she went on trying to be brave about that. “Now you have siblings,” she had said. Dad married for companionship, Rick said, when she commented on his marrying someone his age. They were all there together in the Connecticut house. Well, it was not her fault there was no baby. In prison, when Hal suffered pain, he was loathe to go to prison doctors until his suffering became too great. Finally he was treated for an infection of his seminal vesicles. He'd had no idea this would affect his and Laurel's life. A Delton gynecologist told her there was no reason she could not get pregnant. She had felt foolish at her age keeping a temperature chart; she'd gotten pregnant with William too easily. Then the doctor said Hal must be checked, and he proved to be hopelessly sterile. He didn't know why he had waited so long in prison before speaking to a doctor about his problem, he said.

When she stared at him across the tennis court, it occured to her to say, Hal, why has not one single thing here worked out? Of course, she could not ask.

After he told her Sallie had no imagination in bed, and since she couldn't compete with Sallie's bosoms, she decided to be more sexy. She had not forgotten the night she asked him if he liked her new shortie trousseau nightgown, and he looked away. Then staring at the blouse, she realized other women would have filled it out. She had not enjoyed trying to nurse Rick, and she became “dry as a buckshot field in August.” Her mother provided the description. Anyway, she had thought being confined to a nursing schedule was a bore, and she had not found the whole experience a galvanizing one at all. But she wanted to nurse Hal, and liked lying atop pillows or turning backward, trying every position that came to mind. She liked his wanting her twice in one night; everything was a new experience. She had learned to suck his balls because he liked that. One night she suggested the wheelbarrow position; though once she explained, he did not feel up to it. She was relieved. She did not have the energy, either, to walk about on her hands while he held her thighs and inserted himself. Yet she would have tried.

Now that Laurel was here in this quiet country farmhouse without the active household she had left behind, she had more compassion for her mother's difficult role as a widow. She wondered if she was right in having refused to move down here when she did. She would wait and see what happened, her mother said, on a foreboding note. Here, she had counted on a family situation. She and Hal had written for months about Christmas in their own house. She had thought about there being grandparents, Mama and Daddy and her mother, and Uncle Pete and Aunt Pris and their children as cousins for Rick. She cooked the first Christmas dinner for everyone herself. Hal shot a wild turkey. By then she wished Natty Bumppo had never existed. And that she had not longed to be the first woman to write intimately about the sacred initiations of the woods belonging formerly to male writers. Sometimes, actively skiing, she and William would quit because it seemed a mindless sport. But hunting! You had to be mindless to sit for hours in silence in a field, or on a log, or in a tree stand in the woods, waiting for a bird to fly or a deer to walk past. She hated the lethal
zing
that brought lives to an end. But she kept up pretext. After Easter, Rick said over the phone his stepmother had dyed eggs and the teenagers waged war with them; what an ache she had felt, thinking of that household. “We went turkey hunting,” she had said. “Wow,” Rick said. Why tell him the day's reality, how after Bloody Marys at lunch Hal slept that afternoon in a field, flies on his face, snoring so loudly any turkey would have flown out of the county. She lay watching soft spring clouds, wondering if the day was as pretty in Connecticut, wondering what Rick was doing. Thinking how back there they had had jelly bean trails around the house on Easter morning.

Hal's family came late to Christmas dinner. He started the cocktail hour alone. Seeing his condition, she threw his last drink into the sink. She knew she would pay for that later. But she spared them all the horror of having him drunk at Christmas dinner. Conversation lagged despite ten people being present. She missed the way dinners had been with William and his mother; having removed herself from the middle-class boredom she grew up in, she had returned herself to it. Pete did remark he believed this thing of working for money was for the birds. People ought to do something they liked. She remembered thinking, If only she could have looked toward Hal with the sense of superiority about life they'd once counted on.

Hal had nightcaps after everyone left, and her mother and Rick were asleep. She followed his stumbling path to bed thinking, This is our first Christmas in our own house.

The Christmas they were apart, they had agreed to look at the stars at a certain hour and think about one another. She remembered his writing when he put his face to the bars a certain way, he could even see the stars whole, without stripes across them.

By the next Christmas, she left her mother and Rick to have Christmas with Hal. He had a ten-day leave, but not being paroled was still not allowed into his county. They went to a motel in Delton called the Ditty-Wah-Ditty. It ain't no town, it ain't no city! the old song went. That motel had been the butt of jokes back in her and Hal's teenage years. She and William were divorced. He knew she went South to see Hal and on her return said, “Your prison friend's a lucky guy.”

“I don't think he's so lucky,” she said. “Why?”

“He got out of prison and is getting out permanently.”

“He got out on a legal pass because he's been a trusty for two years.”

“Still, he's lucky. He killed someone.”

“It was manslaughter. Teddy Kennedy killed someone and didn't go to prison at all.”

“I'm not making points,” William had said.

During those ten days, they drove into the Delta, away from Matagorda. When she went home, she was prompted to send him a postcard from Kennedy Airport.
The Delta was the loneliest looking place on a lowering Sunday afternoon
—
all that flat brown emptiness filled me with a sort of fear
.

Then he sent her a card:

It is my conviction

That loneliness is never

Where one is, but

Who one is with.

The Delta, though cold

And flat and brown

And full of winter emptiness,

Is not lonely.

Even on a lowering

Sunday afternoon.

Or better to say it won't be

Anymore.

She was more in love with him because of his placement of the words on paper. She had written,
I feel absolutely wild with love. And desperate about the times I can't crawl inside your skin and be totally one with you. It's why I want to learn to swallow what I could not when I tried
.

For a long time I will feel you, angel
, he answered.
My hands, my mouth, all feel you this morning. I remember kissing in all the delicious places. I think men with no ties pull easier time than those of us whose hearts and minds live on the outside with people we love
.

Isn't it amazing, she would say, that last year I was afraid to tell people I wanted a divorce and this year I'm afraid to tell anyone I'm married—and to a prisoner? Those ten days were the most fantastic of my life. They taught me what I've already learned, that to live one must be willing to run risks.

All along a cautionary saying her father liked worried itself out of the back of her mind: If chance is present at the beginning, a dice throw will never abolish it.

Only in extreme circumstances were prisoners allowed to marry. As editor of the paper, Hal had been to one such service. A con had remarked, “The groom was tight as hell, but the bride was anything but.”

She had not been certain she would go through with that marriage, even though she arrived with her blood test. Out one day with Buddy, Hal had gotten his. Then again she found herself on a Mississippi highway heading toward marriage, and with uncertainty in her heart. He went into a phone booth on a highway and called the minister they both knew, Brother Walker, who brought the children to sing at the prison. She had wondered at the strangeness of things, that the man had come back into her life. “Preacher, will you marry us?” she could hear Hal saying over the roar of passing trucks. She went into the rest room of a filling station and changed into a soft dress and high heels, thinking, What a strange place to get ready to be a bride.

On their wedding night, Hal said, “This is what I was made for, to lie around and make love. All I've ever wanted to be was a playboy. I just never had enough money.”

Those words could rankle this much later. At the time she thought how she and William had struggled and about their aims and goals and the future they wanted for Rick.

But they were in love; while all people thought their love was special, she and Hal knew theirs really was.

They intended keeping the marriage secret till Hal was out—till he crossed those tracks for the last time. Unexpectedly, he told his family after a while; she had had to tell her own, and that included William. Waiting a year for Hal, secretly married except for her family knowing, she began to panic.