Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“Oldest daughter had it. It was during the time her mother and I were going through our divorce. A bad time all the way around. She was fourteen then; she didn’t have any other weapons. We should have seen it before we did.”

“How is she now?” I said, my annoyance vanishing. So he had walked that bad road, too. Glynn’s thinness must hurt him to see. He couldn’t know how much better she was.

“She’s dead,” he said, looking down into his glass, where melting ice turned the remnants of the Bloody Mary pink.

“Oh, my God—”

“No, no. Not from the anorexia. I think we’d mostly licked that. That’s what made it so—awful. It was an automobile accident. She was with some kids driving up the Delta to a Christmas party in a town upriver, and they went straight into a semi. It was late, and the kid driving had been drinking. We should have been on top of that, too, but we were so glad she was beginning to date and go to parties that we didn’t…we should have talked to her, of course; we should have called the kid’s parents before they ever left, or something—”

He broke off and sucked the pink water through his straw, making a rattling, blatting sound. His face was shuttered and his eyes were blank. I felt tears spring to my eyes and a lump form in my throat, and reached over and put my hand over his.

“I’m so awfully sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to pry. It must be…terrible.”

“Yes. It is.”

And then he looked up and smiled.

“I’ve got two other kids. A girl named Katie and a boy named Tom. After me. The T.C. is for Thomas Carlyle. Family names, both of them; the old man never read a book in his life. But it used to embarrass me at school, so I started using the initials. Tom’s starting to do it, too. Drives the whole family nuts. They’re good kids. I’ll be seeing them in the fall.”

“I gather they’re back home…where?”

“Greenville, Mississippi. Heart of the Delta. From your accent I’d say you were no stranger to that country.”

“No. Louisiana for me; Baton Rouge. I went to LSU, and then to Atlanta to work, and that’s where I’ve been ever since. I’ve never been out of the South except traveling. I knew you were from the Delta. There’s no other accent quite like it.”

“And no other place. Thank God. Yep, they’re in Greenville with their mama, and likely to stay there till they’re planted in the family plot. Tom’s starting the university at Oxford this fall, and Katie is knee-deep in cotillions and debuts and all that retro stuff we do so well on the Delta. They’re like their mother; they’re absolutely certain-sure of their place, their world. I’m glad for them. They won’t spend their lives wandering around looking for the place they’re meant to be. But I miss them. It’s all I do miss of that territory back there, those kids. I wish I could see them in my place, up there”—and he gestured toward the mountains—“but that’s not going to happen, I don’t think.”

“They don’t like it up there?”

“They don’t know it up there. Annabelle won’t let them come, and they can’t do it on their own until they’re eighteen. She thinks I deserted them for the West, and she doesn’t think the life of a hermit is a proper example. She’s probably right. God knows what they tell their friends I do. I see them back home when I see them. Of course, it’s not really me they see there, so I guess they’ll never really get to know me. But it’s better than nothing.”

“I don’t think I like this Annabelle,” I said.

“Me either, much, now,” he said. “But God, I was so crazy about her when I first met her that I practically went trotting around after her baying like a hound. She was a cheerleader at Ole Miss and I was a professional fraternity boy devoting myself to drinking and screwing and making just good enough grades to stay in school and keep on doing both. Not that you could screw Miss Annabelle Pritchard of Oak Grove Plantation. Her daddy would bite your ass off. So I married her about two hours after her graduation. It was a garden wedding at Oak Grove. I would have married her in a Buddhist ceremony to get in her pants. And I have to say, in those early years she was something. The perfect wife for a good old Delta boy living off his daddy while he decided what to do with himself. It was only when I started to change that she did. Or rather, didn’t. I realize now that I asked a literal impossibility of her, but then we shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place. We just should have screwed till we got it out of our system. She was on the pill from the time she was sixteen, no matter what her daddy thinks.”

“You don’t like your family much.” It was not a question.

He laughed.

“Not worth shit. It’s entirely mutual.”

“Why?”

He raised the black eyebrows.

“For a proper Southern lady you sure do ask a lot of questions.”

“Oh, Lord, that was rude, wasn’t it? I don’t know what got into me. I’d absolutely never do that at home—”

“Precisely. You’re a different person out here. Like I am. Don’t apologize; it’s just what I hoped would happen to you. Well. My family. What to say about my family that Faulkner didn’t say better? My family has always had land and money and pale skin and blond hair and bluer blood than anybody else in the entire Delta, or so the conventional wisdom goes. And not a brain in the lot of them. My grandfather owned a bank in a little town near Greenville called Pennington, and by the time he died he all but owned the town, too. My father took over both in his time, and now my brother, Cleve, is running things. I was supposed to; I was the oldest son. But I hated that damned bank like poison ivy; there was no way anybody was going to get me into the bank or the life that went with it. And tell you the truth, I don’t think my father minded too much; here was this dour black cuckoo in that shiny isinglass family nest; it just wasn’t seemly. Old Cleve looked the part and wanted the bank worse than hell, so when I cut out Daddy just moved him right on in there. It was the right thing to do. Cleve is the best bank president in Pennington, Mississippi, which is to say the only one.”

“So what did you do? How did you get out here?”

“First I thought I wanted to be a newspaperman, so Daddy got me a job on the Greenville paper. He owned a chunk of that. I was a good writer; still am. Freelance writing is how I earn my living. But I hated the reporting part. I had to go interview the families of murder victims, of people who’d drowned in the river or gotten squashed on the highway, or of little kids who’d died of just plain being poor; black families who’d been tornadoed out of their shacks and trailer parks—I couldn’t do it. I quit after a year. Then I worked in the research library at Ole Miss. I liked that pretty much, but by that time the sense that I wasn’t in the right place was starting to eat at me. And things were starting to sour with Annabelle. I brought a couple of black coworkers home to dinner once or twice, and she just couldn’t make the jump. I didn’t like being told who I could have in my house and who I couldn’t, so I started staying away a lot.

“About that time I got offered a job in a big PR firm in Jackson, and she didn’t want to move, and I couldn’t stay around Greenville and Pennington anymore, with my whole family nipping at my heels like hounds at a coon.…I don’t know, I just picked up and moved to Jackson. I thought for a while I could come home on weekends and eventually persuade Annabelle to move, but you’d do better trying to get a penguin to move to the equator. She just couldn’t do it. All her…her self was tied up in the town and the house and her clubs and the kids and her mama and daddy, and mine, and the plantation—and none of mine was. Then I got sent to a convention in Berkeley, and came up to those mountains with a guy I met who was a great hiker, and we got up there into the redwood country, and something in the ground just ran up out of it and through the soles of my feet and up into me, and I knew that that was it; there it was. That was my place, and that would be where I found out who I really was. So I started coming back whenever I could, and after the divorce and my daughter…after that, I just went up there one time and stayed. By that time Daddy had died and left me enough money to live on for a long time if I’m careful. I think he always meant me to clear out of the Delta, because he left property and stock to Cleve and my sister and cash to me. I found a place in Palo Alto and got a job in the Stanford library, just filing and sorting at first, but I didn’t care; it wasn’t a career I wanted. And every weekend I went up into the Santa Cruz’s. And one weekend I found the fire tower and followed the trail down to the lodge, and old Caleb baby was there with a toots, and I knocked on the door and told him I’d look after his property in exchange for living in his fire tower. He asked me about money, and I thought he meant for me to pay rent, so I said I thought I could manage a little bit every month, and he laughed and said that what he’d meant was how much I wanted. I said I didn’t want any, just the tower, and I meant it; I didn’t want to be too beholden to him. So he said sure. I never did like him, but I came as close as I ever did then. And I’ve been here ever since.”