Sharyn McCrumb - If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him…

Mother and Casey served a three-lettuce salad- plain, of course; some boiled asparagus; an orange slice on a toothpick; and something that Mother called polenta au naturel .

“Mother, it’s grits!” I hissed at her. It was. Unbuttered, unsalted grits .

“I know, dear,” she replied serenely. “It’s almost the only thing that everyone would eat. And, just think, it’s so much better for you without all that butter and salt. One needs to watch one’s diet as one grows older.”

I wondered if she was referring to herself or to me. I trust the former, because if that’s a sample of what I have to eat in order to reach thirty, I’d just as soon not go. I did not complain, however. I sat there dutifully, pushing forkfuls of grits and endive from one side of my plate to the other, and fantasizing about top sirloin and ketchup-laden french fries, followed by chocolate syrup over anything. The conversation was rather antifood anyhow-distinctly unappetizing. I asked for some sugar to go in my tea (not real tea: stewed weeds). Apparently, this request constituted blasphemy. Casey looked grieved and declared that refined sugar was quite poisonous to the system, but that they did have some honey, if I wanted some.

I was about to settle for that when Annie Graham-Robeson remarked, “That isn’t much of an improvement over granulated poison. Did you ever stop to think that honey is actually bee vomit ?”

Well, no, I hadn’t ever thought of it in quite that picturesque way, though I shall never be able to think of it otherwise again. It did, however, dull my enthusiasm for squirting some of it into my drink. I drank weak herbal tea straight, hoping that the bitter taste of it would kill my appetite before anybody heard my stomach growling. Apparently, it is now chic to brag about how little you eat. That established, they all went back to talking university gossip, and about the many uses of pesto. At that point my mind glazed over.

I wish I could remember what we used to talk about. I only remember that I was never bored. And sometimes, I think that if I can’t ever talk to you again, I’d be better off eating unbuttered grits until I waste away into nothingness. If that’s where you are, it can’t be all that bad.

Love,

Elizabeth

IT WASN’T SOMETHING that he would admit to another adult, but sometimes when he was getting ready for work, Bill MacPherson would watch Mister Rogers on his tiny black-and-white television. Occasionally when he was meeting with clients, Bill found it comforting to think of the calm and sensible Mister Rogers, who never seemed to be shocked or angered by anything. A succession of petty criminals, sullen teenage vandals, and vicious divorcing couples had convinced Bill that he and Mister Rogers did not live in the same neighborhood; today he had begun to wonder if they lived on the same planet. Dolphin weddings and dead polygamists seemed beyond the scope of any wisdom within Fred Rogers’s power to impart. Bill was on his own.

Now, as he followed Edith’s telephone directions to Donna Morgan’s house, he tried to think where to go from here, but he knew it was too soon to make any decisions on the matter. Chevry Morgan was dead, which meant that he no longer needed to pursue a case of possible bigamy against the man. Whether Donna Jean Morgan would have farther need of his services in a criminal capacity remained to be seen.

He found the house without difficulty. It was a one-story white frame house, with a green-striped awning over the front porch. It sat back from the blacktop road, flanked by a grove of pine trees. Donna Jean Morgan was in the front yard, near the plaster deer, weeding the bed of pansies set out in the whitewashed truck tire. She was alone.

Bill eased the car up the bumpy dirt driveway, sighing with relief that a contingent of police cars was not in evidence. Donna Jean, straw hat and gardening trowel in hand, came to meet him. Her dumpling face was splotched from crying, and her gray hair was scraggly and uncombed. She wore a faded housedress and men’s high-top sneakers.

“I just had to do something,” she said, pointing to the flower bed. “I thought that if I sat in that house one more minute, listening to the phone ring, I’d go right out of my mind. It’s not that I don’t grieve for poor darlin’ Chevry. You understand, don’t you?”

Bill nodded. All except the grieving part, he thought. “If you are saddened, then I’m very sorry that your husband is dead,” he said, choosing his words carefully. As humanity went, he privately thought the world could spare Mr. Morgan and never miss him. He wondered if Chevry had possessed the forethought to prepare a will, but decided that it would have been out of character. Just as well for Donna Jean, too. A court fight could eat up an estate in no time.

“Where’s Tanya Faith?” he asked.

“Over to her parents.” Donna Jean dabbed at her eyes. “She left as soon as we heard.”

“Can you tell me what happened?”

She led him to a shaded circle of lawn chairs in back of the house. Bill had to decline lemonade, coffee, homemade pound cake, and a footstool before he could get her to sit down in the canvas chair and focus on the problem at hand. Finally, after a quick trip into the kitchen for a box of tissues for herself, Donna Jean was ready to talk. “Chevry went off last night, like he always did these days, to fix up that big old house next to the church for him and Tanya Faith. He came by here first, because I always packed him some supper to take along while he worked.”

Bill had vowed not to interrupt, but he heard himself say, “Why didn’t Tanya do that?”

Donna Jean gave him a tearful smile. “Oh, honey, Tanya Faith can’t hardly spell cook. Anyhow, I packed his food, and-”

“Wait.” Bill pulled out his pocket notepad. “I’d better get this down. Exactly what did you give him to eat?”

“Well, I had some ham left over from Sunday dinner, and I made him some potato salad, because he’s always been partial to it. I put in some bread-and-butter pickles that I made back in the summer, and I gave him a plastic margarine tub full of leftover baked beans. There was four or five fresh-baked biscuits, too, and a baby-food jar with homemade grape jelly in it. And a couple of homemade doughnuts. Chevry always said that working gave him an appetite.”

“Did anyone else eat this food?”

“Only me,” said Donna Jean Morgan. “And there’s just my word on that. Tanya Faith is what you call a picky eater. She had ice cream for dinner, and then she went next door to baby-sit for the neighbor’s little girl. So she didn’t see what I ate.”

“Okay. Then what?”

“Well, he didn’t come back last night. I went on to bed early, same as always, and Tanya Faith sat up awhile, wondering why he hadn’t come home, but she couldn’t drive, so she just fretted about it until nearly midnight. Finally she called her daddy, and he drove over to the old house, and found Chevry laid out in the kitchen, soiled with his own upchuck-” She broke off here and covered her face with a clean tissue.

Bill waited until the sobs subsided. “Was he dead?”

“Not then. Reinhardt called the rescue squad, and they took him off to the hospital in Danville, but it wasn’t no use. He kept on being sick right along, and finally his heart gave out from the strain of the convulsions. He died around six this morning. The sheriff’s department was here by eight.”

“What did they say?”

“The sheriff’s deputy-a Mr. Brower; nice, polite-spoken feller-he told me that Chevry had died under suspicious circumstances. The doctors in Danville were insisting on an autopsy and saying that they thought Chevry might have been poisoned. Mr. Brower knew all about Chevry’s marital situation, and he seemed to think that had a bearing on the case.”