The Devil and the River (34 page)

The phone was answered within moments, and Bob Thurston’s slurred voice greeted him.

All Gaines said was, “Bob, it’s John . . .”

Thurston replied, “I’ll be there right away.”

He was there right away, or so it seemed, but when Gaines glanced at the clock, it was nearing five thirty a.m. More than an hour had passed, though had he been asked, he would have said that he’d stepped across the threshold of his mother’s room no more than ten minutes earlier.

Thurston attended to Alice Gaines alone. He took her body temperature, made notes, recorded the estimated time of death on the certificate, signed it, tucked it away in his case, and joined Gaines in the kitchen.

Gaines had made coffee, asked Thurston if he wanted some.

Thurston said yes, that would be much appreciated.

“I am surprised,” Gaines said. “Not greatly, but a little.”

“That it wasn’t more dramatic?”

“Yes.”

“Better this way, John. She passed in her sleep. She would not have known anything at all.”

Gaines stopped filling the cup. “You believe that? That we’re just a body and a brain, that there’s no separate awareness?”

“I don’t know, John.”

“I do. I think she is still alive. She, herself, not my mother, because my mother was a physical personality as well, but whatever force of life animated my mother’s body is still alive. Whatever awareness gives us life is still there . . .”

Gaines finished pouring the coffee, brought it to the table for Thurston, and sat down.

Thurston did not respond to Gaines’s comments, and there was silence between them for some time.

“I will get Vic Powell over here,” Thurston eventually said.

“I can call the Coroner’s Office,” Gaines said.

“Let me deal with it,” Thurston replied. “I want to deal with it, John.”

“Okay,” Gaines said. He closed his hands around his coffee cup as if to draw warmth from it.

“You will not be able to avoid a service and a memorial, John,” Thurston said. “Too many people knew her, and too many loved her. You are going to have to accept that you will not grieve alone.”

“I know.”

“So what can I do?”

Gaines shook his head. “Nothing.” He looked at Thurston, his gaze unerring. “I am okay, Bob. I think I am okay.”

“Well, you know I am here, whatever’s going on, alright?”

“Yes, I know. Appreciated.”

“I’ll call Victor Powell,” Thurston said. “I’ll deal with all of that. You need to organize her funeral. Maybe not today, but soon.”

“I can deal with it.”

Thurston rose. “Do you want me to say nothing? Do you want to tell people yourself?”

“No, you tell whoever, Bob. It’s not an issue.”

“I just wondered if you wanted some time alone. If I tell people, you’ll be overwhelmed with visitors.”

“That is inevitable, Bob. It happens now, or it happens tomorrow or the next day. Best just to deal with it.” Gaines smiled weakly. “You cannot postpone life, and you can’t postpone dying either, right?”

“Seems not,” Thurston replied.

Gaines stayed in the kitchen while Thurston used the phone in the hall. His conversation with Coroner Powell was hushed, respectful, brief.

Gaines stood near the back-facing window and looked toward the horizon. His attention was again caught by the brief flicker of light out there in the field, but again he dismissed it.

“He’ll be here soon,” Thurston said as he came back into the room. “He’ll take her to the mortuary, and then we’ll arrange for the undertaker to prepare her for burial. Have you thought . . . ?”

“My father was buried in Europe,” Gaines said, “but he had a family plot in Baton Rouge. She wanted to be buried there.”

“Understood. Then best to contact whoever you need to. But tomorrow. That can wait until tomorrow.”

“It’s Sunday,” Gaines said. “It will have to wait until tomorrow.”

“I’ll stay with you until Victor gets here, then,” Thurston said.

“No, Bob, it’s okay. You go on back home. Go have breakfast with your family. I just need a little time alone with her before she goes.”

Thurston nodded understandingly. He walked toward Gaines, and for a moment they just looked at each other.

Gaines held out his hand. They shook.

“Thanks for all you did for her, Bob.”

“I wish I could have done more.”

“Don’t we all?” Gaines replied.

And then Bob Thurston gathered up his things and was gone, and John Gaines returned to the window and watched for a little while as the sun rose across the fields, and he tried to empty his mind of everything, but could not.

In that moment, he knew that there was nothing left in him of the child he’d once been. His mother had kept that part of him alive, the small reminiscences and anecdotes, the reminders of barefoot summers, the stories of the father he had never known.

Now it was all gone. Gone for good.

A ray of sunlight, bright and precise enough to be solid, and yet within it the constant motion of dust particles, broke through the kitchen window.

John Gaines reached out his hand toward it. The motes swarmed and danced around his fingers.

He closed his eyes. He inhaled deeply, exhaled once more, and tried to recall the last words he had shared with his mother.

There was nothing there at all, as if she—in leaving—had taken with her the very last memory that he’d possessed.

I
t nagged at his thoughts. The light in the field.

He could not see it now, but he had seen it earlier, believed it to be nothing more than something reflective catching the rays of the rising sun. A discarded bottle. A tin can. But it had flickered before dawn. He had seen something out there in the back field before the sun even rose, and so it could not have been what he thought it was.

Victor Powell came. He was quiet and methodical, and he went about his business and did not ask questions of Gaines until he and Gaines had taken Alice out on the gurney and into the back of the vehicle. And then they came inside once more. Gaines sat at the kitchen table, and Powell stood for a while in silence before he spoke.

“I met your mother on the first day she arrived here,” he said. “It was the spring of 1968. You were on your way to Vietnam, far as I recall.”

Gaines looked up at Powell. All he could think of was the fact that his mother would now be in the morgue alongside the Dentons and Michael Webster. That and the light in the field. He had looked for it, but it had gone. Later he would walk out there and see what he could find.

“What was it like?”

Gaines frowned, shook his head. “What was
what
like?”

“The war? In Vietnam?”

“The war?” Gaines asked, almost of himself. “I should imagine it was like any other war, Victor. The strange thing is that since this has happened, since we found Nancy, it has been in my thoughts far more than ever.”

Powell merely nodded, as if understanding that there was no appropriate acknowledgment for Gaines’s comment.

“I thought a great deal of your mother, John,” he said. “I am really sorry she’s passed, but it was inevitable.”

“It’s inevitable for all of us.”

Powell stepped forward, took the chair facing Gaines. “Was there anything specific that you didn’t have a chance to say to her?”

Gaines didn’t reply.

“I mean, I have often found that not everything has been said . . . everything that needed to be said, and sometimes it is just best to say it. Say it out loud. Say it like they can still hear it.”

“I understand,” Gaines replied, and then he slowly shook his head. “There is nothing that didn’t get said.”

Powell reached out and closed his hand over Gaines’s. “I am taking her now. You let me know of the arrangements, and if you wish to see her again . . .”

“I will, and thanks, Victor. Thank you for being her friend.”

Powell rose slowly. He put on his hat, walked to the door, looked back once more at Gaines, and then left.

Gaines listened to the sound of the mortuary wagon as it pulled away, and then there were voices outside, those of Caroline and her parents, Leonard and Margaret. They came in from the back yard, and when Caroline saw Gaines she rushed towards him and started to cry.

Gaines just looked back at Margaret and Leonard, their faces like lost dogs, and he closed his eyes. He held Caroline tight as she sobbed, and he could smell juniper in her hair, and he was reminded of a girl he once knew from Fort Morgan, Alabama, but he could not remember her name.

It seemed that they stayed that way for some small eternity, and then Margaret pulled Caroline away from him. They all sat, and Margaret made coffee, and Caroline started talking. Once she started talking, it seemed that she did not want to stop, for to stop would mean silence, and it was always in the silence that her grief returned to fill the vacuum.

They talked among themselves then—Margaret and Leonard and Caroline—and Gaines listened, as if eavesdropping on a conversation that had nothing to do with him. He was thankful for their presence, for the decision that Margaret made to make eggs, to feed him, for had they not been there, he would have eaten nothing.

He did eat, surprising even himself, and quietly, as if in slow motion, he seemed to return, inch by inch, to some semblance of the real world, to the reality that necessitated funeral arrangements, a memorial service, the transportation of his mother’s body out to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to be buried in the plot that was always meant to welcome his father.

It seemed then, strangely, that Alice had been yet another victim of this sequence of events that had begun with the discovery of Nancy Denton.

Gaines was struck with the oddest thought: that Alice had gone after Nancy, after Webster, too, to find them, to ask them, to resolve the mystery for herself.

Do the dead commune with the dead?

Is that how it worked?

And then—once more—the sense of chill and dread that invaded his whole body when he asked himself what they had unleashed in Whytesburg.

He did not pursue that thought. He let it go. He tried to listen to the Rousseaus. He tried to stay right there in the kitchen with his neighbors and be the person he was supposed to be at such a time.

It was not long before Bob Thurston returned, and then came Eddie Holland and Nate Ross, and shortly thereafter Richard Hagen arrived from the Sheriff’s Office, Lyle Chantry and Forrest Dalton in tow, and soon the house was filled with voices and noise. No one seemed to notice when Gaines slipped away to his mother’s room, drew a chair to the edge of the bed, and sat there with his eyes closed, the tears welling behind, the anguish and pain in his chest too much to bear now, the words that he wanted to say vanished somewhere forever.

It was Thurston who came to find him, and he stood there with his hand on Gaines’s shoulder, and he said nothing as Gaines sobbed. When Gaines could cry no more, he just waited with him until he had gathered himself together again, and then they left the room and returned to the kitchen.

Hagen had gone, as had Dalton, Chantry, Ross, and Holland. Margaret and Leonard were back home, but Caroline had stayed. So it was that the three of them—Alice Gaines’s son, her doctor, her caregiver—sat in that kitchen and spoke of other things, things that bore no relevance to the death of Alice, things that were meaningless and irrelevant in the face of what had happened, but—at such a time—were perhaps the best things of which to speak.

Gaines understood that it would be weeks, months, before he even began to appreciate the meaning of this. It was said that each anniversary and special occasion needed to pass at least once—a full turn of the calendar—before you could begin to accommodate such a change. Only then, as he contemplated this, did Gaines appreciate some small aspect of what Judith Denton had suffered. Death, at least in a physical sense, was all encompassing and final. There was no coming back. There was no chance of circumstances conspiring to present some other outcome. But Nancy’s disappearance for all of twenty years? The sense of hope, growing ever weaker with each passing year and yet somehow kept alive by the sheer will of her mother, was then dashed to pieces. Judith Denton’s suicide demonstrated that she had continued to survive solely and only because of her hope. And when that hope had gone, well, there was no reason to continue.

Gaines always imagined that Alice had hung in there for one reason—to see him find someone, to see him married, perhaps start a family, to give herself the certainty that her son would be cared for. But perhaps it had not been that at all. Perhaps she had finally resigned herself to the fact that the only way to get her son to do anything along that line was to show him how deep and profound real loneliness could be. She was all he had, and with her gone, well, perhaps his necessity would rise to the point where he did something about it.

He did not know, and for now it did not matter.

It was late afternoon by the time Bob Thurston and Caroline Rousseau bade their farewells, Caroline with the reminder that she and her folks were only next door, that Gaines should come across and eat with them if he felt like it.

He thanked her, thanked Thurston for his time, his concern, his friendship, and then he watched them leave the house, Caroline turning left, Thurston driving away toward the center of town and home.

Gaines stood there for a while. The evening was warm, a good deal of moisture in the air, and he went back inside to pour himself a drink.

It was as he raised the glass to his lips that he remembered the light in the field. He smiled to himself. Why did this thing engage his attention so much? Surely it was nothing.

He set the glass down, left the house by the back door, and stood on the veranda. He looked out toward the point where he had seen it.

There was no reason for any sense of disquiet or unease, but as he tried to identify the precise spot, he was aware that the air seemed cooler, an almost electric tension present in the atmosphere. He passed it off as merely imagination. It had been a terrible day, a day filled with awkward, inexplicable emotions, a day of guilt and sadness and pain and heartbreak, a day that presented him with a future that he neither understood, nor cared to understand.