Secret Lives (5 page)

After a bit, I went back home. Ma was gone,
and Daddy and Kyle was at the mill so I took my time picking fruit
from the bowl, from underneath so Ma wouldn't likely realize it was
missing. I got my shoes and a lantern, the dictionary and grammar
book and this journal and came back to the cave. My cave. When I
first looked around the cave with my lantern, I felt rich. It is
like the caverns the tourists visit at Luray though much littler.
The first part is long and narrow with a pitched floor that takes
you down to the main part, which is one enormous great room. I can
see a little tunnel shooting off the back. This great rooms got
reddish colored rocks coming out of the ceiling and floor. I know
they are called stalactites and stalagmites because I learnt that
when I been to Luray. In some places the ceiling is real high and
the stalactites that come from it is broad and the stalagmites that
climb towards them just as great. In some places the stalactites
and stalagmites (writing them words makes my hand tired) meet and
make walls that look like fancy velvet curtains and there is also a
pool that reflects about a million baby stalactites from the
ceiling above it and the water is so still that I couldn't at first
tell if it was a reflection or a million little stalagmites coming
out of the ground. I don't think I ever seen a more beautiful place
than this cavern. Some folks think of paradise as green and full of
growing things, but today I found my own Garden of Eden.

I made two more trips back to the house and
now I have here my mattress, turned over so the stain don't show
and some candles, which I set all round the cave on rocky ledges. I
also brung a blanket and some rags from the rag bag for my female
problem. Kyle didn't say how long this ministrating will last. I
wisht I understood it better. What part of me is bleeding? And what
has the blood to do with babies? I could believe as easy some
spirit has taken ahold of me as I can believe what Kyle's telling
me.

I'm going to spend the night here in my
garden, though I wish now I left a note for Kyle. He'll be worried
since I didn't show up at the mill neither. I am a coward, afeard
of going to my own home. The strap scares me worst than ever.

I'm going to turn out the lantern now and
lie here in the darkness. I'm not scared here. Nothing in my garden
can hurt me.

July 23, 1941

I went back to the house real early this
morning and snuck into my window. I woke Kyle with my finger to his
lips and when he opened his eyes I saw they was red and I felt
terrible for the worry I caused him.

“
Where you been?” he asked. He sounded
angry but I knew it was really worry I heard.

“
I had to stay away,” I said.

“
No you don't,” he said. He looked
excited. “Mama said yesterday you're a woman now, you're too growed
for her to whip.”

I knew Kyle wouldn't lie to me but it was
hard to believe Mama would say that. Kyle swore she did, that she
was real calm after her fit yesterday.

“
Please stay, Katie,” Kyle said. “I
promise I won't let her whip you.”

I was real nervous and I just set on the
chair in our room waiting for breakfast time to come.

I showed up for breakfast like nothing was
different. I was so scared I couldn't touch my eggs or grits and no
one said a word til after Daddy left for the mill. Then Ma stood up
and begun clearing the table and finally she spoke.

“
I'm glad you had the decency to get rid
of that wicked mattress, Katherine,” she said.

I was afeard to turn around and look at her
and I could hear her clattering the pans in the basin.

“
You're growed now,” she said. “Too old
to whup.”

Kyle smiled at me, but then I saw his eyes
get big, his lips go flat. He leaned back in his chair and
hollered, “Ma, no!” Before I could turn to look, Ma took ahold of
my hair and snapped my head back and then I heard the sound of the
scissors as she worked them right close to my scalp and in seconds
my hair lay in a thick shiny yellow pile on the floor.

Ma set the scissors on the table, calm as
you please, and walked out of the room. For a minute I stared at
the hair on the floor and felt tears trying to push out my eyes.
Then all of a sudden, I didn't care. I looked at the hair and
didn't feel a thing. I touched the spikey, hacked off ends of my
hair close to my scalp and felt nothing at all. Kyle jumped from
his chair and grabbed up the hair from the floor. He held it to my
head as though he could attach it back on some how.

“
Leave it be,” I said. “I want to show
you something. A place I found.”

“
But, Kate, your hair.” Kyle looked upset
I wasn't crying or mad like he thought I ought to be.

I stood up. “Come with me,” I said.

Before we reached the cavern I made him
swear he would never tell nobody what I was about to show him. I
pulled aside the brush I set against the entrance and led him
inside and when I lit the lantern he let out his breath in a long
whistle. I could see he was amazed and I felt proud.

“
I can get away from her here,” I
said.

He walked around like I did the day before,
touching the stalagmites, staring into the reflecting pool.

“
You can't stay out here,” he
said.

“
Just sometimes,” I said, though I had
been thinking how good it would be to sleep here on hot summer
nights.

“
We have to get to the mill,” Kyle
said.

I touched the back of my hair and the ends
of it felt like broom bristles against my palm. “I'm staying here,”
I said.

I spent the rest of the day turning the
cavern into my hide-a-way. The Smith's house has been deserted
since last year when they left for West Virginia, so I took a chair
and a table from there and drug them back here. I found more
candles there too and a lap desk filled with pencils and paper.
There's a long rock above the reflecting pool—sort of a ledge that
makes a perfect bookshelf for my dictionary and grammar book. Now
they can stand upright like they is sposed to be. High above the
place where I lay my mattress there is a deep hole in the wall and
this is where I'll keep my journal.

–
4–

Ben Alexander sat on the bed in his cabin
high above Lynch Hollow, a small battered address book on his knee.
He took another swallow of whiskey from the bottle on the floor and
stared at the name on the page in front of him. Valerie Collins.
She was the last one. Over the past few months, he'd called
everyone he'd ever known. Valerie was his last hope.

She used to send him cards at Christmas.
She'd address them to both him and Sharon, but he knew they were
directed to him alone. The cards were always a picture of Valerie
with her salukis. As the years wore on she'd taken on the look of
her dogs, sleek and long-limbed. Her nose grew thinner and more
pointed, her hair longer, silkier, blacker. Sharon laughed as she
followed Valerie's transformation from woman to canine, never
catching the meaning behind the cryptic messages: Hope to see you
soon, or Love you. He knew Valerie meant the singular you. She
didn't know Sharon and didn't care to.

He took another taste of the whiskey and
moved the phone from the apple crate he used as a nightstand to his
bed. Surely Valerie would want to hear from him.

The phone was army green, cracked and held
together with masking tape that threatened to break with each turn
of the rotary dial.

“Hello?” Her voice was soft. If a saluki
could talk…

“Valerie?” He sat up straight.

“Who's this?”

“It's Ben Alexander, Valerie.”

There was that heavy silence he was growing
accustomed to. The name would register, the newspaper images of his
face, bearded then and lined with fatigue, would race through
Valerie's head.

“It's late, Ben. I'm on my way to bed.”

He shot ahead in desperation. “I was
wondering if we could get together? I'm living in the Shenandoah
Valley now, but I could drive up to D.C.—it's been a long time—I'm
divorced now. I don't know if you knew that.”

Silence again. Then a sigh. A drawing in of
breath and courage. “Ben, the honest truth is I don't ever want to
see you. You must have really changed over the years to do what you
did. Please don't call me again.”

He jumped when she slammed her phone down,
and it was a moment before he set his own receiver back in its
cradle.

He sat on the edge of the bed with his hands
folded in his lap for many minutes. The light behind the open door
of the bathroom pulled at him seductively, and he pictured the
bottle of Valium on the edge of the sink. He'd gotten the
prescription filled months ago, but he hadn't taken a single pill.
Twenty still in there. They would do the trick. How long would it
take Kyle to find him? When he didn't show up at the site in the
morning, Kyle would assume he'd overslept or had some urgent
errand. But by afternoon Kyle would start to wonder. And by evening
maybe he'd take a drive up here and find him. Ben would leave him a
note, thanking him for being the one person who believed him, for
offering him the job at the digs when no one else would hire him,
for being a friend. Ben shuddered. He couldn't do that to Kyle.

He took another drink. Drinking too much
these days. And alone. Little option there. The only people who
would condescend to drink with him were not the kind of people he
wanted as friends. People who looked at him knowingly, who winked
as though they understood how a man could do what he'd been accused
of doing.

He'd hoped that here in the Valley he could
escape the knowing eyes. But one or two people knew and they'd told
others. Sometimes he felt as much a leper here as he'd been in
Annapolis.

The phone rang and he had a brief flutter in
his chest at the old fantasy: somehow Bliss had stumbled across his
phone number, and when he picked up the receiver he would hear her
five-year-old voice, perplexed, asking, “Daddy, aren't you ever
coming home from this trip?”

He lifted the phone to his ear. It was Kyle.
“Sorry to call you so late,” he said, “but my niece arrived
tonight.”

Ben said nothing, still caught in the fantasy
of his daughter.

“Ben? Remember? She's working on a film about
her mother?”

“Yes. Right.” Eden Riley.

“She'll need to get a feel for the site. It
was so much a part of her mother's life, and you can use an extra
pair of hands this summer, can't you?”

Ben pictured the Valium and turned his back
on the gaping bathroom door. “Does she know anything about the
site?” he asked.

“Nothing, but she'll learn fast. You have no
objection, do you?”

“No, of course not.” He wanted to ask, so he
could steel himself for meeting her, “Does she know about me?” but
he couldn't. He would know by the look in her eyes if Kyle had told
her or not. “Sure, it's fine. Just send her over in the
morning.”

He hung up and carried the bottle over to the
sofa. He turned on the TV, made a quick tour of the channels, and
turned it off. He lay back on the sofa and stared at the brown
water stain on the wood-plank ceiling.

He hated being alone. He'd managed to avoid
it most of his life. He and his older brother, Sam, had been
inseparable as kids and close to their parents. He'd never gone
through the usual adolescent rebellion. His parents flowed too
easily with the punches. But they'd been dead five years now, and
he was glad they hadn't lived to see this past year and a half. He
liked to think they would have been certain of his innocence, but
he wasn't sure. It was better not to know, to imagine they would
have stuck by him as Sam and Jen had done. Sam and Jen had been his
life support during the trial. They still saw Bliss, calling him
after each visit to say how cute she looked, how unscarred she
seemed to be. “She's fine,” Jen would tell him. “And she asks about
you.” He wondered if she still did, or if Sam and Jen just told him
that. It had been a long time, and kids' memories…well. Plus she
had a new dad now. Jeff. Did she call him Daddy, with the dimple on
the second syllable he always used to watch for?

Sam and Jen had begged him to stay in
Annapolis after his stint in prison. “You need to be near us,” Sam
said. Perhaps they knew what he hadn't known then. The ostracism he
would face. Shunned by expeditions, he applied for openings at half
a dozen universities but was turned down by all of them. And then
the call came from Kyle.

“Why didn't you let me know?” Kyle admonished
in the familiar soft voice Ben knew from the years as his student,
the years as his friend. “I heard about it through the grapevine.
But I wanted to hear it from you.”

So Ben told him as calmly as he could about
the accusations, the trial, the tide of evidence he felt helpless
to stem as it mounted against him, the prison term. Then he told
Kyle about losing his job, not being able to find work
anywhere.

“I know you like a son, Ben.” Kyle's voice
was sure, full of conviction. “I wouldn't care what evidence they
showed me, I could never believe you were guilty. I can offer you a
job here—the arthritis doesn't give me much time in the pits
anymore. I know it's a pathetic offer after what you're used to.
Please don't be offended.”

“No, that'll be great.” Just that day he'd
been turned down to muck out stables.

At first he stayed close to Kyle and Lou. He
was so relieved to feel trusted and he knew their sympathy was
genuine. The three of them went to see Heart of Winter shortly
after his arrival, when he was still numb from the months in
prison. That movie changed his image of Eden Riley. She was known
for her portrayal of angels and earth mothers and, Bliss's personal
favorite, the beautiful witch in Child of the North Star. But now
he could picture Eden only in that hotel room scene with Michael
Carey. One sexy scene in an otherwise unsexy movie. One sexy
departure from a tenaciously unsexy career. He couldn't scrape from
his mind the image of Carey undressing her from the inside out.
Expertly. Slip, stockings, panties, bra, leaving her in a silky
black dress open just enough to tease the camera with a glimpse of
her breasts.