Tomorrow River, Page 2

I wasn’t sure how long he’d been at it, but it’d been long enough that he’d ripped to shreds the chiffon scarf that Woody sleeps with. My twin was beside herself, grasping for it. It’s the only thing left of Mama’s that smells like her.

  I reached for her and said, “Hushacat . . . hushacat . . .” without even thinking, and that’s when Papa blew up.

  “Cease and desist!” he said, lunging for me and dragging me by my ankle off the edge of the bed. “Don’t you tell her to hush.”

  “But I wasn’t telling her—” Hushacat is one of our twin words. It means “Everything’ll be all right no matter how bad it seems at the present time.” But Woody . . . she must not have heard me because she leaped on Papa’s back and he flicked her off and she landed on the wood floor next to me.

  “Stand!” he shouted down at us.

  Trying to pull her up with me, I warned, “Woody . . . please . . . you gotta do what . . .” But then Papa slapped me on the back real hard because he was so far gone. Mumbling and cursing and smelling so bad from the vomit on his judge’s robe, he chased us out of our bedroom, down the front staircase, and through the back door, straight to the side of the house.

  I kept swearing to him the whole time, “I didn’t mean anything. I wasn’t telling her not to talk. I was just trying to comfort her.”

  The night grass was cool on our bare feet, the moon half full when he jerked up the latch. I could hear the Calhouns’ hounds barking from across the creek. “March,” he commanded, flinging open the root cellar doors.

  Woody ran right over to her corner, and knelt down on the sandy floor like she’s supposed to, but I only went down the first crumbling step, still hoping I could persuade him. “Sir . . . I—”

  He said through clenched teeth, “If your sister doesn’t speak soon, Shenandoah, mark my words, I’ll . . . I’ll send her off the way your grandfather wants me to.”

  “Your Honor? Please?” I said, reaching out to him.

  I thought he was going to give in because he took my hands in his, but then he bent my fingers back and pushed me down the rest of the steps. “This . . . it’s for your own good,” he said, and then the cellar doors banged shut and the padlock snapped closed and it was so dark.

  He let us out soon after the morning birds began singing. He always comes before Lou and Mr. Cole report for duty, so they don’t know. Sometimes Papa’s still drunk and will inspect our knees to make sure we were repenting all night long. Sometimes he’ll have slept it off and come begging our forgiveness at dawn. Woody and I never know which of himselves he’ll be when he opens up those root cellar doors, so that’s why we got to kneel, just in case. When the sun came up this morning, he was still drunk.

  “C’mon now,” I say, pressing that dangling bandage back onto Woody’s knee. “Up and at ’em.” When she doesn’t make a move to sit up straight, I give her hand a hard tug. “We don’t want Lou reporting to His Honor that we’re being recalcitrant, do we?” Despite the too-hot-for-June morning slicking her skin, my sister shivers. I give her nose an Eskimo rub. “No, pea, we certainly do not.”

  Chapter Two

  Louise of the Bayou has been acting more like Cleopatra of the Nile.

  I guess it was about a month after Mama vanished that caretaking Mr. Cole must’ve mentioned to Papa that Woody and I needed some tending to and he was right. We weren’t eating regular and since neither one of us is exactly sure how to run the washing machine, you could smell us coming long before you saw us.

  Papa would take care of us if he could, but he can’t. He’s too busy being sad. So that’s why Mr. Cole, who can read well enough but whose spelling is simply awful, had me sit down on his porch steps and write a letter to his niece in my absolute best penmanship:

  Greetings and Salutations Miss Louise Marie Jackson,

  How are you? We’ve got a lot in common because I was named after the place I was born the same way you are. Say, would you mind hopping a bus to come do for my sister and me? The quicker, the better?

  Though I regret it now, I signed that letter with xxx’s and ooo’s so she couldn’t hardly refuse, could she.

  Hoodoo-believing Louise arrived two weeks later on the Greyhound and ended up mostly liking it here at Lilyfield. The weather and the wildlife suit her. It’s not as sweltering and there are fewer skeeters and no gators like there are in Louisiana and she’s having a romance. What Lou doesn’t like about living with us is Papa. She warns Woody and me all the time with wide white eyeballs, “You gals better be sleepin’ with your shoes on. There’s no predictin’ what your pappy will do next. He’s actin’ like the worst kind of zombie there is—one of them irritable half-dead ones.”

  Being from the deepest part of the South the way she is, Lou tends to exaggeration so that statement is only partially true. She knows good as Woody and me that Papa is entirely lively when it comes to his rules.

  Woody and I come barging into the kitchen to find our housekeeper swaying her seventeen-year-old behind in front of the stove, keeping the beat to “Darlin’, darlin’, stand by me,” which is blaring out of the blue transistor radio that’s sitting on the windowsill above the sink.

  I wish I could tell you that Lou looks like three miles of bad road, but she doesn’t. She’s got creamy toffee skin and legs up to here. A round rump. And a good chest, too. Pointy as two cookie cones. But just like folks are always saying, “Pretty is as pretty does,” and she doesn’t do much around here lately except treat Woody and me like two of her not-so-loyal subjects.

  Lou ladles the flapjack batter into the black fry pan and gives us one of her dirty looks before she says, “It’s ’bout time. Why ya always gotta go up to that dumb fort anyways?”

  On my way over to the sink, I don’t say to her, “Those little wood steps that lead up the trunk of the tree are real loose. Papa can’t get up ’em.”

  The reason I don’t tell Lou or Mr. Cole or anybody else about His Honor coming after Woody and me is that I do not want his shiny reputation dulled. Nobody would ever suspect that he’s behaving the way he is towards us. When he goes out and about, it’s as one of the most respected men in this town, but when he’s home, I think being here reminds him more that his wife isn’t. He can’t help what’s happened to him, poor man. The liquor and his missing-Mama feelings are what’re doing him in. They’re getting mixed into some kind of heart-wrecking cocktail. Papa never used to drink all that much, but he started up after his wife vanished and it’s just gotten worse and worse. He’ll get better if I can find Mama. Not a doubt in my mind.

  “Forts are for children,” Lou says. “You’re gettin’ too old for that sort of thing. Y’all should be thinking about attractin’ some boys. Look at the two of ya. All ratty and scuffed up. Don’t you know that young women’s got to take care of their skin? Men like it soft.” She smooths suet on hers. “Crawlin’ around on that fort floor, thas what’s wreckin’ your knees.”

  “What’s that?” I turn on the sink water good and hard. Holding Woody’s hands beneath the warm stream and doing the same to mine, I point to the faucet and shout back, “Can’t hear you.”

  “I know you can, Shen,” she shoots back. “Ya think I’m a fool?”

  “I refuse to answer that on the grounds that it may incriminate me,” I say under my breath, wishing yet again we could get back the old Lou. She wasn’t always this harsh. Woody and I took to her the minute she came down those bus steps so timid in a patched gray dress, holding twin sticks of peppermint in front of her. I stepped forward to take her paper sack of belongings and said, “Welcome to the Commonwealth, Miss Louise. Thank you ever so much for comin’.” With a bashful smile, she said, “Yes, ma’am,” so quiet that I had to ask her to repeat herself, that’s how soft-spoken she was back then.

  “We got big things ahead of us today,” I tell Woody once I’m done lathering, rinsing, and toweling us off. “Eat good.” I get her situated in her chair at the round wooden table. Tuck a napkin under her chin. Boy, we could use a bath
. Her neck’s got a ring around it, so I bet mine does, too.

  “I told ya yesterday and the day before that, you girls better be doin’ something useful with your time. Something besides gallivantin’,” Lou rants over her shoulder.

  “FYI,” I say. “What we’re doing isn’t called gallivantin’. That means roaming without purpose, and we’re full to the brim with purpose, isn’t that right, Woody?”

  Sometimes I throw out a line real quick like that, hoping to catch her forgetting that she doesn’t talk anymore, but like always, my sister doesn’t take the bait. She’s too busy wiggling her fingers through her hair. She’s been doing that sort of thing more and more lately. Repeating a task over and over and won’t stop unless I make her, which I immediately do. Lou will threaten to cut off Woody’s hair again if I don’t.

  “FY . . . FI . . . gallivantin’ . . . roamin’ . . . call it whatever ya want.” Lou lowers her voice to its muddy bottom. “Ya know good as me, if His Honor finds out I’m lettin’ ya run loose like I is, there’s gonna be the devil to pay.” She reaches for one of my braids and wraps it around her hand. “You get caught runnin’ wild, your pappy’ll blame me. He could send me back home to the swamp, but . . . hey now, that’d suit you just fine, wouldn’t it, sis?” she says, bending my head back to hers. “Ya better remember that deal we got. Or else.”

  What her highness is referring to is the fact that our father made Woody and me vow not to step one foot off Lilyfield. He even hired Miss Bainbridge to come school us but she had to go have a baby. I wish I could, but I can’t tell you exactly why Papa’s been acting more and more like a jailer and less and less like a father. My suspicion is that he’s worried sick that if he allows his precious girls out of his sight we could disappear the same way his beloved wife has. That’s why I recently had to make Lou a turn-in-two-circles-jump-over-a-broom hoodoo promise that if she’d let Woody and me escape while Papa’s out on his ride every morning, I’d do the bathroom scrubbing for her. Papa passes out early most evenings, which has allowed my sister and me to sneak off to town, but I discovered that’s not a good time to ask folks questions since most have settled in for the night and don’t want to be bothered. There’s a lot at stake here and it’s getting more dire by the second. We have to up our ante. Woody and I need to leave Lilyfield during daytime hours if we’re going to shed any light on the subject of Mama’s vanishing.

  Over the sound of popping bacon grease, Lou screeches, “Pick your head up off that wiped table, Shenandoah Wilson Carmody. What in tarnation is wrong with ya?”

  “Why, there is not one thing wrong with me, Louise Marie Jackson, but aren’t you the sweetest thing to ask.” I’ve had it with her griping. “I’m dead tired is all.” I big-wink at Woody so she knows I’m only being saucy, rise up out of my chair, stiffen my arms, and shuffle across the linoleum towards Lou like one of those resurrected bodies she was fond of telling us about before she got so full of herself. “One of your bloodsucking spirits drained me dry last night. That rotted thing came climbin’ up the fort steps, bit the top off my big toe, stuck in a straw, and sipped aaall niiight looong. And ya know what else? Before it slithered off, it asked me where you slept.”

  “Dead tired, huh?” superstitious Lou says, squinting down at my bare feet. Once she’s sure I’m not bleeding all over her kitchen floor, she shoves me clear back to the table. “That’s what a body gets when it’s up late peepin’ on folks with those big glasses of yours from up in that stupid fort. I know ya was watchin’ me Wednesday night, Shenny.” She waves the spatula an inch from our noses. “And you, Jane Woodrow, if ya don’t quit messin’ with your hair, I’ll get my shears out right quick.”

  If it was just her and me sitting in the kitchen, Louise wouldn’t dare go uppity like she is. She knows all about my temper. And how I’ll do whatever’s necessary to keep my sister steady. Arguments of any sort bother Woody. She’s started rocking.

  “Hey, now,” I say, getting her fingers laced between mine.

  Stupid Lou. I’m not saying that I don’t sometimes, but it wasn’t on purpose that I spied her climbing out of her cottage window that particular evening. (She’s been meeting up with a man after midnight for quite some time, but I’m going to keep that to myself for now.) No. The reason my sister and I finished the night up in the fort had nothing to do with our horrible housekeeper extraordinaire. Last Wednesday was Mama’s thirty-fourth birthday.

  We’d normally have a party for her with presents and white lanterns hanging from the trees near the garden and a yellow sheet cake with chocolate butter frosting, but Mama is in absentia, so there was none of that and no singing neither. Only the sound of Papa’s weeping coming down the upstairs hall and straight into Woody’s and my ears no matter how many pillows we piled atop our heads. His sad can turn to mad so fast that we won’t know what hit us. That’s why we slipped out from between our sheets and ran out to the fort that night. Not to spy on big-headed Lou.

  “I’m warnin’ ya, better watch where ya step when you’re in town,” she says, stabbing the bacon out of the fry pan and onto the white plates. “One of them ’zilary ladies sees ya runnin’ around, ya know how they is. They’ll snitch ya out.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, those auxiliary ladies better watch their mouths.” I do not have warm feelings for those prissy women who prance through town like they own the place and neither did my mother.

  “In the legal field, their back-fence talk is called slander and it’s punishable,” I say, even though I know for once in her miserable life she’s right.

  Only a few folks know that Papa’s keeping us locked up at Lilyfield. I heard from Vera Ledbetter, who works at the drugstore, that he’s telling everybody who dares to wonder why the Carmody twins are not attending choir practice or skimming rocks down at the reservoir or fishing at the lake with the other kids the way we do every other summer. “The girls are not feeling up to socializing just yet. They need time to recover from the loss of their mother.”

  That’s why Woody and I have to be careful. If somebody should notice us flitting here and there, that nosy parker could blab to our father at his weekly Gentlemen’s Club meeting, “Golly, it sure was nice to see the twins running around again, Your Honor.”

  (Believe me . . . that could happen. You live in this town, you got all the privacy of a stampede.)

  Lou drops our breakfast plates down in front of us and props her spindly arms on the table. I get busy cutting the flapjacks into baby bites for Woody, which is the only way she’ll eat them.

  “If’n she was here,” Lou says, “what do you s’pose your mama’d have to say about all this spookin’ about?”

  I could snap back at her, “Well, if Mama was here, we wouldn’t have to be spooking about looking for her, would we, you big ignoramus?” but Woody is about rocking off her chair, so I breathe in deep and answer in my most tempered tone, “‘Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.’”

  “Knock it off,” Lou says, cuffing me on the side of my head. “I ain’t in no mood for any of your mumbo jumbo this mornin’.”

  “That’s not mumbo jumbo. That’s poetry. Miss Emily Dickinson.” I’m this close to getting up out of my chair, picking up the fry pan off the stove, grease and all, and using it to flatten the back of her head. She’s all the time doing this. Trying to make me feel like I’m letting our dear mother down when what I’m attempting to do is the exact opposite.

  I wonder if right about now you might be agreeing with her. Thinking to yourself:

  What’s wrong with this child? Why didn’t she start searching right away? Her mama’s been gone almost a year.

  Well, I wouldn’t be too quick to judge if I were you. I did all that I could.

  I questioned those that live at Lilyfield. I didn’t want to get our father more jittery than he already was, but I asked Mr. Cole Jackson one afternoon where he thought Mama might’ve gone off to and when she might be coming back. He set down his pruning shears and cast h
is eyes heavenward. “Some things in this life are not ours for the knowin’. The Almighty’s got a plan for all His children,” he said. “Found it’s best not to question Him.”

  I should’ve known that’s what he’d say. That’s his answer to almost anything, so he was no help at all.

  I even stooped so low as to bother Lou. “Thought ya was s’posed to be so damn smart,” she sneered when I asked if she knew anything about Mama’s disappearance. “There’s that ten-thousand-dollar reward your granpappy put up, so if’n I knew somethin’ about your mama’s vanishment, don’t you think I woulda told it by now? Shoot. I had that cash money, I’d be livin’ in high cotton ’stead of waitin’ on you spoiled girls hand and foot.”

  Reaching a dead end no matter which way I turned, I began to believe that Mama’s goneness was just some sort of silly misunderstanding. Even after Sheriff Andy Nash showed up at our front porch on All Hallow’s Eve, telling Papa in a suitably haunted-sounding voice: “I’m sorry, Your Honor. I . . . we . . . all of us have done what we can to find Miss Evelyn. The leads just seemed to dry up.”

  The sheriff admitting defeat like that did get my hackles up, but just a hair. I still believed Mama’d come home any moment no matter what dopey Andy Nash thought.

  Especially when December 24th rolled around. Our mother loves all the holidays, but Christmas Eve is her absolute favorite. Woody thinks it’s because she was named for it, that’s why. Evelyn. Mr. Cole trudged out to the woods that afternoon with his ax and drug back the prettiest spruce to set in the parlor. I placed the Mitch Miller Christmas album on the hi-fi the same way our mother would’ve to set the mood for tree trimming. After my sister and I hung our stockings, set out the cookies and hot cocoa, we stood by the front window and I sang over and over, “Oh, Come All Ye Faithful,” but you know—Mama didn’t.

  And on May Day, I was so positive she’d show up with the better weather that I got up extra early and ran down to the potting shed. But when I threw open the door, all I found was Mama’s gardening shoes, sitting on the workbench wrapped in spiderwebs like a haunted present.