The Wedding Machine (18 page)

“Oh, Ray, c'mon,” Hilda says, lighting a cigarette. “We were just pulling your leg a little. I mean, you're so durn tight-lipped about your childhood and all.”

“Forget about that,” Kitty B. says, clapping her hands and reaching for a deck of cards on the table. “We're just getting started having some fun, y'all. I was hoping we could play a game of hearts or ‘oh hell' after this! Like we always do, Ray. And then we can start scheming again about how to get Sis and Capers Campbell together.”

“Oh, my.” Vangie blushes and chuckles nervously as Little Bit scampers over and hops onto her lap. “They would make a nice pair.”

“No thanks,” Ray says, staring Hilda down. “That accident's catching up with me, and I'm plumb
worn out
from the wedding. It's no wonder is it, Hilda?”

Hilda sees where this is going, and she narrows her eyes, “Ray . . .”

“Don't ‘Ray' me. Your friends here spent a whole lot of time, energy, and money getting your daughter married while you, Miss
Princess
of Jasper, stayed holed up in your home like a hermit crab and graced us with your presence for a few moments during the weekend.”

Hilda puts out her half-smoked cigarette, stands up, and stares Ray down. “That's enough, Ray. After all I've been through . . .”

“After all
you've
been through? As if you didn't bring it on yourself,” Ray says. “It's no wonder Angus threw up his hands. He's only human, you know?”

Vangie Dreggs is speechless. She bites her lip and looks down at the remnants of a half-eaten biscuit as Sis and Kitty B. turn to comfort Hilda, but it is too late.

Hilda storms out the porch door, running down the boardwalk and into the balmy night, the salt air lifting her hair and separating it into stringy strands. She is barefoot and she doesn't care how hard the shells feel beneath her heels as she hits the beach. She runs toward the surf, crying and hoping to God she doesn't see anyone she knows out here. When she gets to the water, she half thinks she's going to jump in and swim out into the warm, dark depths until she can't take another stroke. But she doesn't.

Instead, she turns and heads toward the pier, letting the saltwater lick her knees. She walks for more than an hour along the beach with the water up to her thighs, wetting her khaki Bermuda shorts as the wind carries her tears toward her hairline, leaving thin sandy streaks across her cheeks.

“To hell with you, Ray Montgomery,” she says. “You think you know how it is, but you don't. You have no clue, you finicky Charleston witch. It was you who tried to edge your way into the Jasper pack just like Vangie is doing now. You have no idea what my life has been like. Not the beginning of a clue.”

After Hilda passes the pier and the Edisto Motel, she realizes she can't just walk to Jasper in this blackness, so slowly she makes her way back to Ray's house. She tiptoes up the stairs and takes a seat on the little deck at the end of the boardwalk, where she lights a cigarette and hopes none of them will notice she's returned. The lights are on in the upstairs bedrooms, and she supposes that everyone has retired to their own space to read their beach book instead of cackling on the screened porch in a game of hearts. She wishes she could just get in her car and leave, but of course, Sis gave her a ride and she's stuck here in the first lady of Jasper's made-over house with salmon and aqua-colored nautical knickknacks every which way you turn.

As she hugs her knobby knees to her chest, she watches two children come out of the yellow house where her family used to stay. They are carrying buckets, and the father jogs closely behind them with a flashlight.

“Slow down,” he calls. “Wait for me.”

~ JULY 19, 1956 ~

“Where the heck have you two been?” Hilda could hear her father calling to her and her brother, Davy, when they were hunting for ghost crabs one summer night.

Davy was twelve and Hilda was nine, and they had met up with a girl from Davy's class named Marcia Tarleton who Hilda could tell had an awful crush on Davy. Marcia's little sister, Bonnie, was a year younger than Hilda, and the four of them had so much fun chasing the crabs out to the surf that Davy asked the girls if they'd meet them back in a few minutes after they went up and checked on their mama, who fell asleep every now and then with a lit cigarette in her lap.

“Your mother has nearly worried herself to death,” her daddy hollered from the doorway of the screened porch, his hands on his hips and his lips pursed. The bright storm light at the top of the stairs illuminated his gray suit and the dark tie he had loosened at the neck.

Mama?
Hilda thought. She had been snoozing in front of the television in her bedroom with an empty gin and tonic in a bright plastic cup, and Daddy hadn't come home yet from one of his business dinners with the mill executives who flew in from New York from time to time to brief him about the union's plans to infiltrate the company. The executives told him about Norma Jean, who had stood on her loom at the textile mill in North Carolina, and that he'd have to be prepared to pull folks down from the pulp machines if they pulled a stunt like that around here. Hilda's daddy usually stayed in town when he had one of those meetings, and they weren't expecting him to come out to Edisto that night.

“We were just on the beach hunting crabs,” Davy said, sprinting up the stairs to the porch doorway. When he met their daddy, he placed the bucket on the rail and spread his palms out wide to show they had nothing to hide.

“Well, I hope you had one rip-roaring good time, Son, because neither of you are going out of this house at night for the rest of the week.”

“Dad, c'mon,” Davy said. “This is our vacation. We aren't doing anything wrong.”

Their daddy stuck out two fingers as if to make the peace sign and poked Davy right in the collarbone, where he lost his footing and scuffled down two steps.

Then Davy's outstretched hands turned into fists, and he grabbed the bucket on the rail and threw it down at his father's wingtip shoes, where two ghost crabs and a heap of wet sand spilled out across the wooden planks.

Her daddy grabbed Davy by the collar and shoved him down what was at least ten stairs, where he landed at Hilda's feet with a thud.

“I hate you,” Davy said under his breath as he picked himself up and reached out for Hilda's hand.

Before he could stand back up, their father was down the stairs, grabbing him by the collar and taking him out on the end of the boardwalk, where he pulled down Davy's pants, grabbed a cast net by the fishing rods and swatted Davy over and over on his hips and backside, the little metal weights at the end of the net making welts on his bare skin.

Hilda stood stone still, watching her brother yelp and shout for mercy as Marcia and Bonnie's flashlight made its way up the beach to meet them. When their beam shone on Davy's welts and his daddy's arm coming down with the blows of the swinging cast net, Marcia shrieked and dropped her glowing light, and Hilda tried to make out their shadowy outlines as they ran back down the beach toward their home on the other side of the pier.

Through the bedroom window that opened onto the screened porch, Hilda heard her mama stirring in the bed, but she never emerged from her room, and Hilda was the one who brought an ice pack to her brother as he lay belly down on the hammock beneath the house, vowing to run away as soon as he had the money.

The Princess of Jasper
. Hilda shakes her head as she watches through the sea oats while the children's flashlights scan the beach for ghost crabs.
Maybe I did think of myself that way when I was young.

Hilda's father, David Savage, opened the Jasper Paper Mill that resuscitated the dwindling businesses in town in the 1950s. Over three hundred people came to Jasper to work at the mill, and the Savage family lived on boss man's row in an antebellum house at the edge of the mill village drive. The village was made up of shotgun houses on cinderblocks with no running water and big, brown barrels for bathing, but Hilda's house was grand with its tall white columns, and her family had a cook and a housekeeper and running water and a television set, and as a child she really did think they were like royalty in a crude little kingdom where trucks carrying limbless pine trunks barreled by their home each evening.

When her mama would give her a dime and send her down to Condon's department store to buy a new pair of shoes or a milkshake at the lunch counter, the black men in Jasper as well as the poor men would literally move off the sidewalk to let her pass.

“Morning, Miss Hilda,” the men would say, tipping their hats or nodding their heads before stepping off the curb.

Maybe Ray is right. I assumed I ruled the town—back then, anyway
. Her mama didn't help matters much. When she was coherent, she would sit at Hilda's vanity and brush her hair for a half hour at a time, lifting it up to the morning sunlight pouring through her bedroom window. Her mama drove to Charleston and bought fine fabrics for the local seamstress, Mrs. Chalmers, to make smocked dresses and slips and pantaloons for Hilda with little lace borders and thin satin ribbons. She would send Hilda down the mill village row with the fabrics and over to a little apartment above the sweet-shop on Main Street, where Hilda would sit for hours and watch Mrs. Chalmers cut the fabric according to the patterns and sew her exquisite wardrobe together. One day when Mrs. Chalmers's arthritis was acting up, she called Hilda over to her sewing table and said, “Why don't you help me with this, child.”

Hilda's mama never cared when she and Davy went down to the beach at night. She would put on her lipstick and a long bed gown and sit on the sofa doing the crossword puzzle before pouring herself a second cocktail.

Looking back on it, Hilda figures that her mama was just miserably homesick and depressed with her small-town life. She was from Richmond, Virginia, and claimed to have bluer blood than anyone from South Carolina. David Savage had met her at a Virginia Military Institute game where her father served as the president of the college.

Hilda's parents had two versions of the “how we met” story. Her daddy's was that at the end of the game when the cadets threw up their hats in a victory gesture, Hilda's mama ran across the stands, knocking over drinks and tripping over legs, to catch his hat, and she carried it over to him and said, “Hi, I'm Martha Louise Staunton.”

Her mama's version was practically the opposite. That she was sitting there, cheering on the team for the final touchdown when her daddy took off his hat and threw it like a Frisbee into her lap.

At any rate, her parents met at the game. David was from a poor tobacco farming town on the Tennessee border, but he was handsome and driven, and Martha Louise fell for him and followed him up and down the East Coast as he made his way up in the paper mill industry. Hilda was seven when they landed in Jasper, and her mama took one look at their beautiful new home and said, “This is it. We're not moving again.” Her mama liked being in the Lowcountry at first, but the heat and the bugs and the reptiles weren't nearly as romantic as she'd imagined, and she didn't have a friend in the world except for her afternoon toddy.

Hilda's daddy was almost always mad and ranting. He was trying to keep the unions out. He was fighting off the employees' demands. And he was fending off the KKK, who put a burning cross in their yard after her daddy promoted a black man to manage the pulp production.

Hilda's brother did try to protect her from her daddy's wrath. Once when their father was shouting in a harsh tone for Hilda to get in the house and look after her mama, Davy tackled her and hid her beneath the camellia bushes, her smocked dress picking up the leaves and dirt and the stains from the dark pink petals.

“He's in a rage,” he whispered. “If you go in now, you'll get it good.” “But I can't stay out here all night,” she mouthed, picking the petals from her dress.

“He'll storm out when he sees how bad off Mama is tonight,” Davy whispered. “When he gets in his car to drive around, you can sneak in and go straight to bed.”

Hilda nodded and Davy walked toward the porch to tell Daddy that she must be out with her friends.

~ SEPTEMBER 18, 1962 ~

Shortly after her fourteenth birthday Hilda woke up in the middle of the night with her daddy in bed next to her.

It had been six months since Davy ran away. He hopped on a train headed west with some money his grandparents had sent him for his sixteenth birthday, and they had not heard a word from him.

Hilda was not entirely surprised to feel her father's touch beneath the covers. Old Stained Glass had preached the Sunday before that depravity knows no class boundaries, and she knew David Savage was an angry, desperate man.

For the first several times, she pretended like she was asleep, but as the months went by and she entered high school, she would turn over to him, her body drawn to the warmth of his groping hands in her half-sleep haze. It was strange and awful and sad.