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Sunday, April 21, 1996 - Martinsville
Six more days till my wedding. Glaze and I lingered at the little round table in the nook. We had started the day gently and luxuriantly, lounging around in bathrobes and nibbling on the fresh doughnuts that I’d gotten up early to fry, once Maggie Pontiac’s rooster up the street woke Marmalade and me. I loaned Glaze my green velour robe, and it matched her eyes. April days can get quite warm around here, but the early mornings are fuzzy bathrobe times.
We felt lazy and wonderful. Marmalade was underfoot a lot, and Glaze laughed that she seemed to be trying to tell us something. Maybe she had a tummy upset of some sort. She’d woken me up once during the night, pawing at the covers, but I’d been too tired to pay much attention. Now, however, I picked her up, plopped her in my lap, and prodded gently at her belly.
Quit poking me and look outside.
It seemed as round and soft as usual, no excess heat, no hard lumps. “I think you’re okay, Marmalade.” I could have sworn she was disgusted with me as she hopped off my lap and onto the wide sill of the bay window.
I stood up to begin the bread making. I always make three or four loaves from one big batch. I usually braid one with rosemary or scallions in it, put one or two in loaf pans, and I form at least one into a round loaf to bake on a cookie sheet later on in the week. Because I make such a big batch, I end up giving a lot of bread away. Fresh bread is one of the highlights of life. Grandma Martelson’s house always used to smell like fresh bread. I remember burying my face into her apron just to inhale the wonderful scent. Grandma had one of those aprons that’s all one piece, that kind of wrapped around from her neck almost to her hemline. She would let me try it on when I was little. It reached to her knees, but on me it dragged the floor. And then, one day I tried it on and it almost fit me. I’d grown up without even realizing it. I remember ...
How about remembering to look out back?
“... Marmy, stop making that infernal racket. You know I won’t let you out there to chase birds.”
Then let me out so I can chase that man.
“Marmalade, hush! I can’t hear myself think.”
I do not believe this. I do not believe that these two humans are unconscious, regardless of evidence to the contrary.
Glaze peered out past Marmalade’s pacing form, at the chickadees who were strutting around the sunflower seed tray in the back yard. “Other than dealing with a noisy cat, do you ever get bored living in a small town like this?”
“She’s not usually this noisy. She’s been acting funny lately.” I watched her a moment, then turned back to Glaze. “Do I miss the concerts and the museums and such? Yes. Do I ever feel over-inspected by the town criers who watch what everyone else is doing all the time? Yes. But would I want to live at the faster pace of a city again? I did it once, Glaze, for that year before I married Sol, when I worked in the advertising firm in Boston. Once was enough.”
Remembering that I hadn’t rinsed the sprouts yet, I stopped measuring the dry ingredients for the bread and pulled the tea towel cover off the jar to check the progress of the radish seeds. They were about ready to eat. Why do the hulls tend to clump together until I’m ready to remove them, and then they spread out and stick to the sides of the jar or to the sprouts themselves?
“I can always visit a city,” I continued, “to see the plays and enjoy the museums; but then I can come home here to a place where every face I see is recognizable, even if I don’t know all the names. The fancy sights there in the city aren’t enough to trade for the quiet evenings here.”
I looked down at all the little white radish seedlings clinging to my hands. I’d missed having a garden in the city. Tubs on the apartment balcony just weren’t enough.
“It’s time to green up these little guys, so we can use them in the salad tomorrow. I hope you like radish sprouts.”
“I sure do. They’re peppery and wonderful!”
“Think you could do a final rinse with just one hand?” As Glaze moved to my side to take over the de-hulling process, easing the little sprouts into a bowl of water and rinsing them yet again, I noticed that Marmalade was pacing back and forth, faster and faster. She loves watching those birds. “How long has it been since you could see more than twenty or thirty stars at night?”
How long has it been since you have looked for men in your back yard? Look now! He is still behind those big trees! Look NOW!
“In the city? Are you kidding? I never ... What’s wrong with Marmalade?”
“What are you yowling about? Leave those birds alone. They won’t bother you.”
Glaze picked up the thread of her thought. “I never even look for stars anymore. In the winter I can usually see Orion, and some of Taurus, but that’s about it.”
I washed out the sprout jar and dried it. Once the hulls were cleaned off and drained, we transferred them back into the jar and put it on the counter nearest the window so they could get indirect sunlight for greening the little leaves. Then I turned back to the bread process, beating an egg to blend into the goat’s milk, along with some oil and a little sugar. “I like being able to sit on a park bench day or night without worrying about who might sit down next to me. I could never do that in the city.” I measured flour and bran, then warmed the milk mixture before adding the yeast to it, as I continued to recall my feelings when I lived in Boston. “There was a tension that I often wasn’t aware of, but it was always there.”
I was surprised by the strength of my feelings for this little town, and I knew I was beginning to sound like a real estate broker hot on a sale. I thought I’d already guessed the real reason Glaze was asking all these questions. It wasn’t the small town atmosphere. Last night, when Tom had said good night to us, I’d seen her looking at him as if he were pizza after final exams. Her next words surprised me.
“Biscuit, I never had a sister before. I don’t want to give away a chance to get to know you better. I don’t think I’m ready to move here, and you might not want me this close anyway; but could I come to visit more often?” She paused as if gathering her thoughts. “And, could I stay a few extra days this time around? Maybe I could house-sit while you two are at the beach for your honeymoon.”
Not if this guy is still in the back yard.
As I said a heartfelt “Yes,” Marmalade abandoned the window to hop up on my sister’s empty lap. She placed her paws on Glaze’s collarbone, nuzzled her forehead to forehead, seemed to inhale a big breath. My gosh, did the cat love the vanilla, too? Then Marmalade curled up and settled in Glaze’s arms, claiming her right to that spot whenever it was in the house. As I turned back to the bread making and began to blend the flour and bran into the yeast-laden goat’s milk mixture, I couldn’t tell whether the contented sigh came from my sister or from the cat.
Both of us.
~~~~~
FROM THE STATEMENT of Margot Schuss to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation
I saw him often in the deli with his friend Buddy ... No, I haven’t seen him at all this week ... Did I like him? Yes, he was very pleasant ... I wear a size five shoe, but I don’t know that it’s any business of yours.
... Of course he knew my daughter; she works at the deli ... Of course not. She’s only in high school and he must be almost thirty ... I was home all evening and all night. My brother is visiting from out of town. ... Miranda? She came home from the deli around six o’clock and helped me prepare a big dinner ... Of course she was here the whole evening. This was family time ... Library? No, I don’t know why he was in the library.
~~~~~
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 1995
Garner Creek
It was funny, Sarah thought. Last week, about two months after their first lunch, Ben suggested that maybe they should stop meeting in public. He asked her to walk two blocks past the diner, and said he’d pick her up at the street corner. That way, he said, they could have some private time together. He knew a little place where they could go. It turned out to be a motel in Russell Gap, about five miles north of Garner Creek.
She had gone with him, expecting to make love, and then here they were just talking, because having sex didn’t feel right for either one of them. He’d pulled out pictures of Sheila, his wife, and he’d asked Sarah’s advice.
“Have you told her how much you love her?”
“She ought to know I do. I earn good money. I’ve always been faithful. I let her work wherever she wants to work. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.”
“Isn’t that funny? My husband could have said the same thing. Sid has been faithful, I’m sure. He brings in good money. He lets me work where I want to work. That’s not all there is to love. Most women want to be appreciated for who and what they are. Sometimes love doesn’t feel like love if you can’t understand how the other person is expressing it. I’m going to give you a list of good books about how men and women communicate differently. And I want you to read them.”
Sarah stood there in the Hideaway Motel, looking down at the bed she knew they wouldn’t be touching. It occurred to her that if she went back to college and finished her degree, maybe she could start getting paid for all this counseling she was doing.
Turning around to face Ben, who sat in an armchair on the other side of the room, she told him, “You need to be putting your energy into saving your marriage. Why don’t you call up your wife and ask her out to lunch next Wednesday?”
“You mean like a date?”
“Exactly! You love her. It’s time to let her know that.” Sarah could read Ben’s expression. “You’re thinking you’ll invite her to dinner instead and send her a dozen roses. Don’t do that yet. Don’t overdo it. Just ask her to lunch and let her see the caring part of you that I see and that I respect.”
Just like that, it was over.
~~~~~
SUNDAY, APRIL 21, 1996
Martinsville
The rest of Sunday morning was a disaster. How any day can disintegrate like that after such a lovely start, I’ll never figure out. After the bread was safely rising, I set aside the last three doughnuts and licked my fingers contentedly. We thought about going to church, but then decided we needed a long walk instead. I’d never played hooky with my sister before, and I thought it would be fun. Little did I know.
We scooted upstairs to exchange our fuzzy robes for comfortable pants and polo shirts, blue-gray for me (not my best color) and orange for her (not her best color either) and invited Marmy to join us for a stroll down to the river to walk off the sugar overdose before we started sewing. We never made it out of the front yard.
The mailbox hadn’t been painted green this time, or blue or purple or red. It was still black, but it had a crude yet startling skull painted on the side of it. Glaze over-reacted, letting out a banshee wail that curdled my insides and made that third doughnut seem like an even bigger mistake than when I’d eaten it. Even Marmalade, who had followed us out the front door, jumped at the sound.
“My God,” she gasped. “He couldn’t have known I was here. That crazy, stupid, obnoxious bastard!”
I’ve raised three kids. I’m usually up to dealing with hysteria in a fairly straightforward manner. This time I blew it. “Glaze, stop that insane babbling right now. What on earth is wrong with you?” Of course, instead of eliciting a reasonable explanation, my question brought Glaze around to stare uncomprehendingly at me for a moment. Then she turned and ran into the house, followed by the cat. So much for our quiet walk.
Before I followed her in, I took a deep breath to steady myself, and bent to look at the source of her anger. At first glance I thought the skull had been painted on the black background, but found that it was a white ink drawing on black paper that had been glued onto the mailbox. Good old rubber cement is easy to apply, which explained how the skull could have gotten there without our being aware of it. Anyone could have walked by last night and casually slapped on some contact cement, then just pressed the paper into place. In the dark, nobody would have noticed anything.
I realized I should have looked around earlier to see if anyone had been watching us as we discovered what they’d done to the mailbox, but of course there was no-one in sight when I turned to survey the street. The skull, when I looked closely at it, was so detailed it even had a wiggly line for the sagittal suture along the top. Whoever the weirdo was, he was a pretty good artist. I scurried up the walk, happy to duck into the privacy of the front doorway, stepped over Marmalade, and stopped long enough to call Bob at his house before I went upstairs where I could hear Glaze pounding her fist into a pillow.
“Sis, what’s the matter? I’m so sorry I yelled at you. Please forgive me.” She raised her head and shook it, not in answer to my request, but rather as if she were trying to clear her mind of garbage. “Can you tell me what’s going on so I can help somehow?” Glaze quietly straightened up, then walked into the bathroom to splash water on her face with her left hand. One of the advantages of not wearing much makeup is that one can splash and dry off anytime without doing any damage. One of the advantages of having my sister’s bone structure is that she doesn’t need makeup to look stunning with or without splashing.
Glaze folded the towel carefully and placed it back on the rack, then leaned her elbows on the counter, buried her face in her hands - although how she managed that with the splint in the way, I couldn’t tell – and let out an enormous sigh. I stood, undecided for a moment, then stepped over and gathered her up into a hug, and just held her until she relaxed a bit. Now was not the time for interrogation.
“No more questions, I promise, until you’ve got a good strong cup of licorice root tea in you. You don’t have high blood pressure, do you?”
“My sister, the herbal encyclopedia. No, my blood pressure’s fine.
At least it was until I saw ...” Her words trailed off, and I saw her left hand clench.
“Take a deep breath, and then come on down to the kitchen. I’ll brew the tea while you make up some highly improbable tale to tell me to explain this. We’ll drink the tea, and then you can tell me the truth. By then we’ll both be ready to face it. By then Bob will be here and he can hear it, too.” I linked my arm through hers as I spoke and maneuvered her down the stairs – bless that ancient builder who believed in wide stairways – through the vestibule, and into the kitchen. As we walked past the front door, Glaze closed it and decidedly turned the lock. Thank you. It is about time you did that. I have been guarding the door. I stepped over Marmalade, who was purring mightily, and steered Glaze into one of the comfy chairs at the big table so there would be room for Bob to join us when he came in, locked the back door as unobtrusively as possible, and walked back to the stove to retrieve the tea kettle. As I headed to the sink and turned on the cold water, I reflected on how truly lovely it was to feel safe in my house, in my town. The deep-well water was not only drinkable; it was delicious. The traffic was not only slow, it was downright sedentary. Well, except for Sadie ...
The animals that meandered across the streets were friendly dogs and cats – each of them known by sight; raccoons might investigate the garbage cans at night, but there hadn’t been a case of rabies in the whole county for several generations. I hadn’t bothered to make the curtains for the bay window yet, because I’d never felt any threat from the direction of my back yard.
Now, though, I had a sister hunched on the chair with the yellow-flowered seat, looking furious. I’m not, as you well know, particularly squeamish, but this time I had a gnawing ache in my gut that said my safe haven might not be so safe anymore. I decided to add a little lemon balm to the tea. Marmalade was still purring loudly, standing on her hind legs, with her front paws resting on Glaze’s knee.
I have been trying to warn you. Maybe now you will listen.
How could anything in Martinsville be a threat to my sister? My sister, who hadn’t been here before. My sister who’d left Braetonburg right out of high school and spent the next eighteen years fighting for her life before she was diagnosed as a manic depressive in her mid-thirties. She’d been working in Philadelphia for the past five or six years. Before that she had moved around the country so frequently, I always had to wait for a letter or phone call before I’d know how to contact her. She had often sounded low, but never let her crises carry over into her communication with family. Years ago, Mom and Dad and I had been shocked and panicked when the first call came from an emergency room. We’d flown to her hospital bed three different times in three different states, to bring her home and try to help her, only to have her pack up and leave within weeks. What did we know then?
But now was different. This sister, here in front of me, oblivious even to the cat, wasn’t having a bi-polar moment. She was furious, or afraid, about something that she hadn’t seen coming. I hadn’t seen it coming either.
I did.
~~~~~
MARTINSVILLE WAS SETTLED a quarter of a century before the other little towns in this area of the country. Most of them grew up near a creek – easy to do, since the run-off from the nearby age-old mountains had crisscrossed the ancient plains with valleys, and had watered the valleys abundantly. This was a transition area of rolling hills, but our little valley was deeper and steeper than most. The rest of Keagan County – the smallest county in the state – was flat enough for small farming, yet bumpy enough for interest and for keeping out the developers.
The sister town of Braetonburg, where Glaze and I were raised, five miles up the river from here, could have been a carbon copy. One long street hugging the narrow river, five or six parallel streets, pulled together into a net of cross-hatching by the lanes and byways that branched up from the river.
Busy highways tend to grow up on the plains and in the bigger valleys, with longer straightaways and larger towns. Or maybe the towns grow larger because of the wider, busier roads. But Martinsville and Braetonburg stayed peaceable and quiet, and gradually became havens for people who turned their backs on the cities and migrated to the towns like trout to the deep pools where the currents eddied around big boulders. People who avoided the interstate highways as much as possible. People who had the financial resources to live in a town where the arts flourished, but where the ‘natives’ needed customers for our businesses. How they find us, I’ll never know. We’re in such a narrow valley, there’s not a lot of room for new houses, so we’ll probably, hopefully, never have ‘suburbs.’ I often have wondered why Homer Martin and the original five families chose this valley, and how they found it in the first place. Two hundred years ago, it must really have been isolated and inaccessible, but they did find the valley and they started the town. Now people still find us when they need our special brand of peacefulness.
They come from all over, never enough new people to overwhelm the old-timers, but just enough to flavor the town with a variety of ethnic backgrounds and arts. Little Martinsville, that nobody outside Keagan County has even heard of, has a Norwegian deli, a prime quality restaurant, a health store that is chock full of the organic products and herbs and teas I love. We have an old-fashioned hometown grocery store that actually carries cheeses like Ementhaler and aged Gouda year round, and a dance school that every child for miles around attends starting at age three.
We have our own doctor, Nathan Young, the son of one of the town council members, who went away hoping to become a world-famous surgeon, but met a mentor in medical school who believed that doctors should know their patients – the whole patient, the family history, what comforted the person and what hurt – doctors who saw people rather than collections of symptoms, doctors who specialized in caring, and who helped people awaken to their own ability to heal. The office is small, but the care is first class.
We don’t have any lawyers. We have one insurance office and one gas station, and two churches. St. Theresa’s Catholic Church and our non-denominational Protestant Church. I wish we had a synagogue and a Buddhist temple. They would round out the town quite a bit, although their attendance might be a little slim for the first few years. If we want to buy cars, we go to Hastings or Russell Gap. If we want to see a movie, we walk down the street to the Chief Movie House on Thursdays, Fridays, or Saturdays. When I was a kid, some of us used to drive over here to Martinsville on Saturday nights. This is where I first saw Gone with the Wind. Grandma hadn’t wanted me to see it, since it had a swear word in it. I’d already read the book, though, so I couldn’t see that it mattered much.
It was one thing to drive five miles down the valley to see a movie; but it took a major commitment to drive here from any of the big cities in Georgia or the Carolinas, so we never had an influx of fancy summer homes, for the simple reason that getting from point A to point B was too complex for people caught in the fast ruts. When folks moved to our little towns, they tended either to leave very soon, realizing their mistake, or else to stay for long enough to raise kids and grandkids, knowing all the teachers, joining the PTA, telling the old stories. We tend to take long walks in the evening, and we listen to Saturday summer afternoon concerts from the better-than-average town band in the little gazebo on the lawn of the five-sided square. My dad learned to play the trombone for the Braetonburg band when Mr. Johnston had his heart attack, so the Stars and Stripes would sound balanced the coming summer. People said it was community spirit. Dad just thought trombones were fun.
Neither town ever grew across the Metoochie River, for the simple reason that land on the other side is too full of caves and too steep for roads or buildings. Instead, we can look at an old forest of dogwoods and laurels, with some hickory and lots of pine, too inaccessible or undesirable for loggers, but lovely for soothing the eyes on a sunny day.
When I first left Braetonburg to go to the state college, I thought I’d be back. Four years later, though, with a double degree in Marketing and English, it seemed silly to waste all that college-knowledge on a small town, so I’d headed off to an advertising agency in Boston, where life had been giddy and crammed with activity and full of friends and bursting with culture. There, I had longed for the stars at night rather than the city’s neon. There, I learned that I wanted the murmuring of the river rather than the whine of traffic. I enjoyed Boston, but soon realized that my heart had a hole that the city couldn’t fill.
When I lived there, I couldn’t see the Perseides in mid-August, that deluge of meteors that grace the night sky each year. I’d grown up with the Perseides. There were no city lights to get in the way, so on clear August nights, my mom and dad used to bundle us up in the blue and green afghans our grandmother had crocheted. Then they carried us out into the back yard where we’d all four lie huddled together on a blanket and watch the shooting stars whizzing overhead from the north, making brief but startling trails across the night sky. Every time I get a new calendar, I always look ahead to August to see when the full moon will be that month, hoping it’s around the first, or not until after the twentieth, so the night sky will be dark enough for me to see the meteor trails.
In the city, though, I somehow forgot to look for the moon, in the sky or on a calendar page. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed the city for that year, but I wanted a home town to nestle into for the rest of my life. I’d already decided to move back to stay. A week after I came home, I ran into Sol Brandy, who’d been away for four years working in Chicago, with insurance, investments, financial plans and such. He said he had suddenly realized that he missed seeing the meteors in August. We were married the following April. Then we watched the Perseides every year that it wasn’t cloudy, until he died.
Braetonburg had been our refuge. When I took the job as librarian and moved here last year, Martinsville also had felt like a refuge, a placewhere I could heal some more after Sol’s loss, and learn to laugh again. Even when that murder happened, I still somehow felt a sense of safety, as if it couldn’t touch me directly.
But now, I thought as I sat down across from Glaze, Martinsville had at least one person in it that I probably wouldn’t want to meet on the street at night. Some one person I wouldn’t welcome into my home. Someone who had angered my sister.
Marmalade hopped up into my lap and growled. The sound was so unexpected, I jumped, then realized that she had mirrored my thoughts exactly. Only I didn’t know who I ought to growl at.
Try the guy who has been hanging out in the back yard.