Summer in the South (32 page)

1931

Woodburn, Tennessee

“You’re a fortune-teller. Tell me my fortune, old woman.”
“Beware of dark water,” Martha said.

He could have had the other one, the other sister. He had known that from the night on the train, when he first played the jazz clarinet for an appreciative audience of planters’ sons and bankers’ sons, and, walking by her seat and leaning to speak to her, he’d seen her face flush. He’d known then that he could have her, if he wanted her.

And yet when the time came, he’d hesitated, which wasn’t like him. She was too much like the Old Man, the one who’d cheated him of his inheritance, as their branch of the family had been cheating his since the days of the Old Patriarch, Randal Woodburn. He could have her, but could he keep her down, or would she figure out a way to outsmart him in the end, as her father had done?

Tuition paid at Vanderbilt and a handful of stained letters that would have secured for him nothing more than a clerking job in some dusty little town. The Old Man had promised more. He had promised Longford. He’d taken him home, introduced him to his daughters, taken him around to his club. Charlie had expected a stake, a pot of money he could take down to the gambling dens along Frenchmen Street and turn into something large enough to live on until his luck changed. He had already figured out what to do with Longford, although it was clear the Old Man hadn’t seen much value in it or he wouldn’t have offered it to him. But Charlie had seen its dilapidated state, its secluded location, and realized it would make the perfect juke joint and gambling den. Outside the town limits but not too far to make it a difficult drive.

But then the Old Man had died and he’d gotten nothing but paid tuition and a handful of dusty letters of reference. Then Charlie had had to rearrange his plans. He’d gone back to Vanderbilt feeling cheated, knowing he could have her, Josephine, if he wanted her. But not wanting her either. By then he was tired of it all, the whole charade of pretending to be someone he wasn’t, of playing up to the spoiled rich sons of men who’d risen in life by cheating and stealing from the unwary and innocent, just as he was willing to do. Men who’d married for money, just as he was prepared to do. These men had done it for their children, for their sons, just as he was willing to do for his.

King. “Don’t call him that,” Myrtle had said. “Don’t give a crippled boy a name like King.” It had nearly broken his heart to hear her talk like that, a man who didn’t think he had a heart left to break. A man who had never known what love and self-sacrifice was until he looked down into the innocent milky eyes of his little son.

Not that he felt that way about the mother, of course. He’d met Myrtle at a juke joint down by the stockyards, the kind of place drifters and drummers and hotel gadflies frequent to find girls who like to have a good time. It was during that long summer he’d spent living in Woodburn and trying to convince the Old Man that he was worthy of saving, that the Woodburn blood ran true and blue in his veins. The summer when he’d nearly died of boredom and had to break loose every once in a while down at the stockyards with a girl like Myrtle.

King was an unwelcome surprise, at first, a possible wreckage of his plans. But when he’d looked at his son, so small, so twisted in body and yet so fine in spirit, so much like the boy he, himself, must have once been before poverty and hardship took their toll, he’d known that he would do anything to make his life better. Anything. Even pretend to accept a life he didn’t want to live. Even marry for money.

He’d gone back to Vanderbilt determined to have his revenge. But when he’d thought about marrying Josephine, he’d wavered. And several days later, when he’d gone up to Mrs. Stillwell’s to check on Fanny and she, without ever considering the impropriety of her actions, had taken him up to her room and he’d seen the doll lying on her bed, he’d known with a cool certainty what he must do. He was surprised he’d not thought of it before. She had always seemed such a child to him. But now, watching her flitter about the room, he saw how pretty she was, how soft and yielding, so unlike the other sister, Josephine.

He could punish the older sister by choosing the younger one. Because he knew by now that Josephine loved him; he’d seen it in her foolish face. And it had been so easy, too, once he decided what he’d do, to include Fanny in his plans. All it had taken was a promise to take her home, back to Woodburn to the house where she had grown up.

And in nearly two years since then he’d had no reason to regret his choice. She cared nothing for the money; he could spend it as he pleased. And when the money ran out, he’d start selling off the furniture and fixtures, all the precious Woodburn possessions that made them who they were and him who he was not. Josephine might question his actions, but what could she do? She was helpless. Fanny was his wife. He could do with her as he pleased.

And therein lay another benefit to this arrangement, a benefit he had not foreseen. He could punish Josephine by lifting his hand to Fanny. She never said a word, just took it quietly, patiently, but Josephine went around the house with her eyes red and weary from crying at her helplessness. She would kill him if she thought she could get away with it. This brought him a certain grim satisfaction.

But he had to be careful, too. Fanny would let him beat her to death, and if he wasn’t careful he might give in to this sweet urge one night and, in a drunken rage, do something he might live to regret.

She spent all her waking hours trying to decide how to kill him. It was amazing to Josephine now that she had ever loved him. Those days seemed so long ago; she was such a naive girl then, so unaware of the brutality of life. After the elopement she had stayed at Vanderbilt to take her degree in art history, traveling around that first summer to visit relatives because she couldn’t bear to return home, where Fanny and Charlie had taken up residence. Charlie had never returned to school. He had tried to obtain money in exchange for the tuition Papa had agreed to pay, and when that didn’t work, he’d simply spent Fanny’s money. The cousins spoke of it incessantly the summer that Josephine traveled among them, gossiping about the money Charlie Woodburn was going through, the wild parties he threw, the gamblers and bootleggers said to frequent the house. In those days Josephine retained enough of her feelings for Charlie to defend him, to insist that Fanny would never have married, or stayed married to, a man of such low character.

But now she had graduated from Vanderbilt and come home and seen for herself that they were rig ht. That it was even worse than they had imagined. Fanny, swollen and listless with pregnancy, spent most of her days sleeping in her room, her cat purring on her pillow. Charlie was drunk most of the time, sleeping the day away and waking just before evening. You would know he was up by the clink of bottles in his room. And he wasn’t always alone either. Josephine had, on more than one occasion, glanced into the room behind him and seen the pale outline of a woman’s arm nestled in the bedclothes. That had shocked her, as had the state of the house. So much had shocked her in those days before she’d become accustomed to all the ways human beings can find to degrade themselves. Now nothing shocked her.

Martha was too sick to cook and care for the house. She would not allow Clara to set foot inside, so Josephine took over the daily running of the house, refusing to hire outside help, afraid that the rumors already trickling through town would run rampant. That was how she discovered that some of the silver was missing, a sterling silver urn given to one of her ancestors by Lighthorse Harry Lee to commemorate the Battle of Paulus Hook, and a silver christening cup said to have been given to Randal Woodburn by his godfather, Thomas Jefferson. When she asked Fanny, she seemed confused and said vaguely, “Oh, I don’t know. I’m sure they’re here somewhere.” There was a dark bruise on one of her shoulders. “Bumped it on the edge of the tub,” she said blithely. “I’m as big as a horse now, and it’s hard to get in and out.”

Josephine believed her because she was naive in those days, and the terrible truth would not have occurred to her. But she was learning. In June she threatened to call the constable over a party that had dragged on into the small hours of the evening and Charlie, in a fit of rage, drove his fist into the wall beside her head. She had not flinched but it had taken every ounce of courage she had; the threat of violence hung so heavy in the air that she felt sick and light-headed.

The truth dawned on her gradually.

She went upstairs to Fanny’s room and drew back the covers. Her sister’s frail, swollen body made her weep.

“Hush,” Fanny said. “He’ll hear you.”

Josephine went back down the stairs, raging, but he was gone, following the party out. She waited all night and when he did not return she went across the garden to the little cottage where John, Martha, and Clara lived. They confirmed what Josephine already knew, surprised it had taken her so long to realize the truth. When she began to rage, John reminded her quietly, “She’s his wife. He can do with her what he pleases.”

Going out again, Clara followed her and pushed a horrid-looking doll into her hand. It was made of burlap and covered in several strands of dark, silky hair. A hatpin had been driven through its chest, through the middle of a crudely drawn heart. “Show him this and he’ll leave you alone,” Clara said.

Josephine kissed her and gently returned the doll. “You keep it,” she said.

She was glad now that she’d sent Celia to live with Minnie’s family in Bell Buckle.

When Charlie got home two days later, he was not alone. He had the crippled child, King, with him, and the boy’s mother. They sat in the breakfast room, a bottle of whiskey on the table between them. They’d given the boy a glass of buttermilk and corn bread, and he was drinking out of Randal Woodburn’s silver christening cup.

“That belongs to me,” Josephine said, standing in the doorway.

Charlie glanced at her, his eyes narrowing as he looked away from the boy. “It’s mine as much as yours,” he said.

“No,” she said, lifting her chin. “It’s not.” And when he didn’t answer she said, “Get them out of here.”

He stood so quickly she only had time to step back against the pantry door. He crossed the room in long strides, putting his hands on either side of her head and leaning in so close she could smell the whiskey and tobacco on his breath.

“You can’t hit me,” she said. “I’m not your wife.”

“Thank God,” he said.

“Thank God.”

Later, as he climbed the stairs to Fanny’s room, he looked at her and grinned, and Josephine felt her stomach clench with hatred and despair. She went to Papa’s room then and rummaged around in the armoire for his shotgun, but Charlie had obviously taken it. He had probably sold it.

Now she spent all her time thinking about how to kill him. She could tell Maitland, who loved Fanny so much he’d never come home from Sewanee after she married, staying to gather one degree after another. Maitland would do it. Or she could tell the cousins, who had long hated Charlie for taking advantage of Fanny and squandering the family fortune and good name. They would do it themselves or hire it out to some gangster from New Orleans or Memphis.

But on her good days, Josephine knew she had too much of Papa in her to ever let someone else do her dirty work for her. She would do it. Still, she would need help. An accomplice. She sat down and wrote a long letter to Maitland, telling him what was happening.

The result, she knew, would be tragic but inevitable.

The Progress of Love

T
he incident of the strange hand stayed with Ava, hovering always at the edge of her consciousness as she went about her daily routine, dazed and stuporous. It had obviously been a hallucination brought on by the sleep disorder, yet it had seemed so real, the texture of the skin, the slight pressure of the fingers, that even now, thinking about it, Ava shivered.

The lack of sleep was beginning to affect her in odd ways. She was always catching shadows out of the corners of her eyes, hearing strange sounds in the house even during daylight hours: whispers, plaintive snatches of jazz, footsteps on the stairs. Twice, when she was alone in the house, she heard knocking and went to the front door only to find that no one was there. And yet she was afraid to see a doctor for a prescription, afraid the medication would increase the hallucinations or, worse, dampen her creative urge, slow the torrent of work that seemed to occur every night now like automatic writing. At the rate she was working, the novel would be finished by the end of August. She couldn’t let anything interfere with its progress. She often had the feeling she was rushing toward something, some amorphous conclusion that kept her working relentlessly, regardless of its effect on her health.

And yet when Fraser invited her to go shopping with him and Alice in Nashville, Ava gratefully accepted. She was exhausted, and needed an excuse to get out of the house and away from her desk, away from the increasingly silent Will and his vague air of disappointment and regret.

They picked her up early one Thursday morning in Alice’s antique Chevrolet. Ava sat in the backseat and listened absently as mother and son kept up a steady stream of banter like an old vaudeville act. They shopped for a while at the Galleria, where Fraser helped Ava pick out a new purse (“You look like a bag lady with that horrible thing you carry”) and his mother a new dress and matching pumps (“Seriously, Mother, get out of the Keds and tennis suits!”).

“I don’t know what I ever did without you to tell me how to dress,” Alice said in a deadpan voice.

“Suffered unfashionably, I suppose.”

They stopped for lunch at a small tearoom in Brentwood. It was on a block of antique shops and clothing boutiques crowded with well-dressed shoppers.

“Hard to believe all this used to be farmland,” Alice said with a heavy sigh, gazing around the room with an expression of dismay. “Nothing but rolling hills as far as the eye could see. Two of my great-great-grandfather’s plantations, The Grove and Nott Hill, were not far from here.”

“Back in the good old days,” Fraser said to Ava, rolling his eyes.

“Well, they were the good old days,” Alice said sharply, then chuckled softly. “At least they were for some of us.”

“Yes, yes, Ava knows all about the long-vanquished Southern aristocracy. I’ve told her about the Captain and his lovely ways.”

Alice gave him a stern look. “Fraser, you really shouldn’t speak badly of the family.”

“You see,” he said to Ava. “We southern WASPs are not overly religious people but we do practice ancestor worship as devotionally as any Shinto practitioner.”

“Oh, Fraser, really,” Alice said. The waitress came and took their orders and brought them tall, frosty glasses of sweet tea.

“Did you talk to Will about making nice with Jake?” Fraser asked, helping himself to a basket of scones. Ava shot him a warning glance but he laughed and said, “Oh, don’t worry, I told Alice about our conversation. I tell Alice
everything.
”

“I’ll have to remember that,” Ava said mildly.

Alice looked uncomfortable. She took the basket from Fraser with a little shake of her head. “Where are your manners?” she said, passing the scones to Ava. “Would you like one, honey?”

“No, thank you,” Ava said. Her appetite had diminished over the past few weeks.

Alice set the scones down. “I hope you don’t mind Fraser confiding in me,” she said. “We are almost family, after all. At least I feel we almost are.” She colored, then went on blithely. “There are no secrets between family.”

“Really?” Ava said. “In that case, tell me what happened to Charlie Woodburn.”

Fraser laughed loudly. Bright spots of color appeared on either side of Alice’s nose. “What happened to him?” she repeated vaguely.

“How did he die?”

“Rather suddenly,” Alice said valiantly. “He was so sick, throwing up blood and hallucinating. He kept seeing his dead mother everywhere. He wouldn’t let anyone call a doctor, of course; he didn’t believe in doctors. Stubborn and pigheaded up until the very end.”

“I thought he drowned,” Ava said.

“Who told you that?” Alice asked sharply.

“Will.”

Fraser put his chin on his hand and gave his mother a slight, mocking smile.

“Well, yes,” she said quickly. “He was found in the water, that’s true. Out in the Harpeth River on the way to Longford. You know the Harpeth, it flows through town. There’s a bridge at the end of the street where we live that actually crosses it.” Fraser continued to smile at her, one eyebrow raised. Ava said nothing, waiting patiently for her to continue.

“Anyway, he was found in the river but there was an empty bottle in his pocket and he reeked of whiskey. Even after being in the water, he reeked. There was some conjecture at the time that he might have stumbled out of Woodburn Hall and, intoxicated, lost his way in the dark and fallen into the river. In those days there were no streetlamps at the end of the road, only a one-lane bridge, and he may have become disoriented and fallen in. That would explain him being found downriver near Longford.”

“You say he was hallucinating the week prior to his death?”

“Yes, he was very sick. I saw him. It was truly dreadful. The hallucinations could have been brought on by fever. Or by delirium tremens, I suppose.”

“Had he had these episodes before?” Ava asked.

“I really don’t know. Understand, at the time, his elopement with Fanny was considered scandalous. His living under the same roof as Fanny and Josephine was even worse. My mother wouldn’t allow me near that house. I had to sneak over to see them. And Josephine, well, poor Josephine suffered terribly, because how could she expect to make a good marriage after all that scandal? They were so isolated, the two of them, shut up in the house alone with Charlie. No friends, no family, no visitors. Just the riffraff Charlie associated with. And he was a violent man. He carried a pearl-handled derringer like the riverboat gamblers used to carry. I was terrified of him.”

This was not the Charlie Woodburn of Ava’s novel. He had been misunderstood and mistreated by life, forced into a role he was untrained for in a society that constantly devalued him. Ava had imagined him as a lonely, Christlike figure, yet she knew that truth was subjective, that it was only natural that Alice, Maitland’s sister, would see Charlie differently. She remembered Will’s assertion that Charlie had beaten Fanny. But that could have been something constructed later by the family to explain his murder. To justify it. Somewhere between the man Alice remembered, the man Will had been told about, and the man Ava had imagined lay the real Charlie Woodburn.

Ava said, “Celia had gone to live with a cousin after her father’s death, but why didn’t the cousins keep an eye on Fanny and Josephine, too? Why did the family turn their collective backs on them?”

“Because Charlie wouldn’t allow them to set foot in the house! He was Fanny’s husband, and in those days that meant something. He could do with her as he pleased, and no one could lift a finger because they were legally married. He would have thrown Josephine out, too, if she’d been less determined, but she would never have agreed to leave Fanny.”

“What about Clara? She was in the house with them, too, wasn’t she?”

“She lived in the cottage out back with her parents, Martha and John. But Martha was sick by then. She couldn’t come up to the house and work, and John wouldn’t allow Clara in the house. Charlie seemed to take particular pleasure in tormenting her. He would curse her and threaten to take a horsewhip to her father, who was a proud man, a prominent member of the African-American community.”

“You said Charlie was a violent man. Did you ever hear of him physically abusing Fanny?”

“Good Lord,” Alice said, gazing at her with an expression of alarm. “Of course not. Josephine would never have allowed that. Maitland would never have allowed it.” She took a long drink of iced tea, set her glass down again with a slight frown. She dabbed her mouth with her napkin. “Of course, such things did happen in those days but mainly among the—” She paused. “Mainly among other families, but not those along River Road.”

The waitress brought their food and they ate for a while in silence.

Fraser touched his mouth with his napkin and smiled at Ava. “You did a very nice job of changing the subject but you still haven’t told us how your talk with Will went.”

“I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“That well?”

“Fraser, be quiet,” Alice said.

Fraser waved his hand at the waitress and ordered a round of gin and tonics.

“It won’t work,” Ava said. “I don’t like gin.”

“Well, Missy, we’re going to sit here until you tell us, so you might as well spill it.” Ava stared at him obstinately until he said, “Okay. I’ll start. What did Will say about your secret visit to Jake Woodburn’s wood shop?”

Ava was dismayed to feel her face flushing. “I’ve already told you. He wasn’t happy about it. And it wasn’t a secret visit.”

Alice chuckled.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Fraser said.

“He doesn’t much like Jake, for obvious reasons, and he doesn’t want me hanging out with him.”

“The obvious reasons, I suppose, have to do with Hadley Marsh. What does he say about her?”

“Not much. He admits that she’s dead.”

Fraser giggled. “That’s a start,” he said.

“But other than that, he’d prefer not to talk about her.”

“Well, of course he does,” Alice said. “It was so tragic.” She waved one hand vaguely and picked up her iced tea. “All of that.”

“Tragic because they both fell in love with Hadley or tragic because she died?” Fraser asked.

“Both,” Alice said, regarding him evenly over the rim of her glass.

“What’s Jake’s story?” Ava said, folding and refolding her napkin in her lap. “Has he ever been married? Girlfriend?”

“He keeps to himself, which makes him all the more desirable,” Fraser said. “I think he turns down invitations and refuses to socialize because it makes him more mysterious.”

“But
could
he socialize? Would he be accepted?”

“Of course,” Fraser said. “He went to the right schools, he has the right pedigree. No one cares anymore that his branch of the family crawled out of the woodpile.”

Alice sniffed. “Well, some care,” she said.

“
Most
don’t care,” Fraser said. “Those old social customs that kept his grandfather down don’t apply anymore, thank God. I think Jake’s criticized more for the fact that he doesn’t seem to give a damn about dinner parties and joining the country club than for his obscure beginnings. By holding out he makes society feel bad about itself. How great can those things be if someone like Jake doesn’t want to join? And he’s a great-looking guy, you’ve seen that for yourself,” he said, slanting his eyes at Ava. “But he has a tendency to love the ladies and then leave them, which, of course, makes everyone nervous. No husband wants a guy as good-looking as Jake Woodburn on the loose.”

“So he has dated women in town?”

“He’s not gay, if that’s what you’re asking. Unfortunately.”

“Fraser, please,” Alice said, looking around at the other tables with an air of apology.

The waitress brought their gin and tonics.

Ava thought of the photo she had found in Will’s room. “Hadley must have been some girl to have both Will and Jake fall for her.”

“Well, she was gorgeous.”

“Of course she was.”

Fraser laughed. “Don’t say it like that,” he said. “You don’t need to feel intimidated by Hadley Marsh. She didn’t have your depth, your strength of character, your
loyalty.
Did she, Mother?”

“Oh, heavens no,” Alice said. “There’s no comparison at all.”

Ava made a wry mouth and Fraser laughed again. “Loyalty” was not a word they would use to describe her in the future. Not if her novel was ever published.

“You two are polar opposites,” Fraser said, continuing his comparison of Ava to Hadley.

“Apples and oranges,” Alice agreed, happy now that the waitress had brought their drinks.

W
orking late at night in the dark, sleeping house, Ava was vigilant now, listening for the creak of footsteps, quiet sighs, vague knockings behind the walls. She no longer switched on the lamp. She had not touched it since that evening when it felt like someone, or something, took her hand. She was accustomed to the occasional late-night hallucination but the horror of that moment had imprinted itself upon her mind in ghastly detail. She would not risk it again.

She wrote now by the light of her computer screen, crawling wearily into bed in a room illuminated by its dull, glowing light. The writing continued unabated; nothing seemed to interfere with that. She was quickly approaching the climax, and she knew now with a fair degree of certainty who had killed Charlie. It had come to her in the days following her trip to Nashville with Fraser and Alice. Some offhand comment made by Alice had brought the murderer’s motive suddenly and clearly into focus. From that point on, everything fell into place. It was all so clear now. She was astounded that she had not seen it before.

Toward the end of August, she got a call from Jake.

“I have something for you,” he said. His voice sounded curt, distant.

“Oh?”

“A photo.”

“I’m listening.”

“My mother found it in some old things she had.” And when Ava didn’t respond, he said more soberly, “A photo of Charlie Woodburn.”

Ava was quiet, bracing herself. In light of her novel’s ending, she wasn’t sure she wanted to see it. But how could she refuse? “I’d like to see it,” she said.