Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories Read online

  Arthur had hoped that one day the novelty of city life would pale and the girls would come back to North Carolina. But the girls stayed up north and married and began their own families. Their visits and phone calls became less and less frequent. Arthur was hurt by that, hurt deep, though never saying so. He aged more quickly, especially after he’d had a stent placed in an artery. After that Arthur did less around the farm, until finally he no longer grew tobacco or cabbage, just raised a few cattle. Then one day he didn’t come back for lunch. She found him in the barn, slumped beside a stall, a hay hook in his hand.

  The girls came home for the funeral and stayed three days. After they left, there was a month-long flurry of phone calls and visits and casseroles from people in the community and then days when the only vehicle that came was the mail truck. Marcie learned then what true loneliness was. Five miles from town on a dead-end dirt road, with not even the Floridians’ houses in sight. She bought extra locks for the doors because at night she sometimes grew afraid, though what she feared was as much inside the house as outside it. Because she knew what was expected of her—to stay in this place, alone, waiting for the years, perhaps decades, to pass until she herself died.

  It was mid-morning the following day when Sheriff Beasley came. Marcie met him on the porch. The sheriff had been a close friend of Arthur’s, and as he got out of the patrol car he looked not at her but at the sagging barn and empty pasture, seeming to ignore the house’s new garage and freshly shingled roof. He didn’t take off his hat as he crossed the yard, or when he stepped onto the porch.

  “I knew you’d sold some of Arthur’s cows, but I didn’t know it was all of them.” The sheriff spoke as if it were intended only as an observation.

  “Maybe I wouldn’t have if there’d been some men to help me with them after Arthur died,” Marcie said. “I couldn’t do it by myself.”

  “I guess not,” Sheriff Beasley replied, letting a few moments pass before he spoke again, his eyes on her now. “I need to speak to Carl. You know where he’s working today?”

  “Talk to him about what?” Marcie asked.

  “Whoever’s setting these fires drives a black pickup.”

  “There’s lots of black pickups in this county.”

  “Yes there are,” Sheriff Beasley said, “and I’m checking out everybody who drives one, checking out where they were yesterday around six o’clock as well. I figure that to narrow it some.”

  “You don’t need to ask Carl,” Marcie said. “He was here eating supper.”

  “At six o’clock?”

  “Around six, but he was here by five thirty.”

  “How are you so sure of that?”

  “The five-thirty news had just come on when he pulled up.”

  The sheriff said nothing.

  “You need me to sign something I will,” Marcie said.

  “No, Marcie. That’s not needed. I’m just checking off folks with black pickups. It’s a long list.”

  “I bet you came here first, though, didn’t you,” Marcie said. “Because Carl’s not from around here.”

  “I came here first, but I had cause,” Sheriff Beasley said. “When you and Carl started getting involved, Preacher Carter asked me to check up on him, just to make sure he was on the up and up. I called the sheriff down there. Turns out that when Carl was fifteen he and another boy got arrested for burning some woods behind a ball field. They claimed it an accident, but the judge didn’t buy that. They almost got sent to juvenile detention.”

  “There’ve been boys do that kind of thing around here.”

  “Yes, there have,” the sheriff said. “And that was the only thing in Carl’s file, not even a speeding ticket. Still, his being here last evening when it happened, that’s a good thing for him.”

  Marcie waited for the sheriff to leave, but he lingered. He took out a soiled handkerchief and wiped his brow. Probably wanting a glass of iced tea, she suspected, but she wasn’t going to offer him one. The sheriff put up his handkerchief and glanced at the sky.

  “You’d think we’d at least get an afternoon thunderstorm.”

  “I’ve got things to do,” she said, and reached for the screen door handle.

  “Marcie,” the sheriff said, his voice so soft that she turned. He lifted his right hand, palm open as if to offer her something, then let it fall. “You’re right. We should have done more for you after Arthur died. I regret that.”

  Marcie opened the screen door and went inside.

  When Carl got home she said nothing about the sheriff’s visit, and that night in bed when Carl turned and kissed her, Marcie met his lips and raised her hand to his cheek. She pressed her free hand against the small of his back, guiding his body as it shifted, settled over her. Afterward, she lay awake, feeling Carl’s breath on the back of her neck, his arm cinched around her ribs and stomach. She listened for a first far-off rumble, but there was only the dry raspy sound of insects striking the window screen. Marcie had not been to church in months, had not prayed for even longer than that. But she did now. She shut her eyes tighter, trying to open a space inside herself that might offer up all of what she feared and hoped for, brought forth with such fervor it could not help but be heard. She prayed for rain.

  The WOMAN WHO BELIEVED in JAGUARS

  On the drive home from her mother’s funeral, Ruth Welborn thinks of jaguars. She saw one once in the Atlanta Zoo and admired the creature’s movements—like muscled water—as it paced back and forth, turning inches from the iron bars but never acknowledging the cage’s existence. She had not remembered then what she remembers now, a memory like something buried in river silt that finally works free and rises to the surface, a memory from the third grade. Mrs. Carter tells them to get out their History of South Carolina textbooks. Paper and books shuffle and shift. Some of the boys snicker, for on the book’s first page is a drawing of an Indian woman suckling her child. Ruth opens the book and sees a black-and-white sketch of a jaguar, but for only a moment, because this is not a page they will study today or any other day this school year. She turns to the correct page and forgets what she’s seen for fifty years.

  But now as she drives west toward Columbia, Ruth again sees the jaguar and the palmetto trees it walks through. She wonders why in the intervening decades she has never read or heard anyone else mention that jaguars once roamed South Carolina. Windows up, radio off, Ruth travels in silence. The last few days were made more wearying because she’s had to converse with so many people. She is an only child, her early lifelong silences filled with books and games that needed no other players. That had been the hardest adjustment in her marriage—the constant presence of Richard, though she’d come to love the cluttered intimacy of their shared life, the reassurance and promise of “I’m here” and “I’ll be back.” Now a whole day can pass without her speaking a word to another person.

  In her apartment for the first time in three days, Ruth drops her mail on the bed, then hangs up the black dress, nudges the shoes back into the closet’s far corner. She glances through the bills and advertisements, but stops, as she always does, when she sees the flyer of a missing child. She studies the boy’s face, ignoring the gapped smile. If she were to see him, he would not be smiling. Her lips move slightly as she reads of a child four-feet tall and eighty pounds, a boy with blond hair and blue eyes last seen in Charlotte. Not so far away, she thinks, and places it in a pocketbook already holding a dozen similar flyers.

  No pastel sympathy cards brighten her mail. A personal matter, Ruth had told her supervisor, and out of deference or indifference the supervisor hadn’t asked her to explain further. Though Ruth’s worked in the office sixteen years, her coworkers know nothing about her. They do not know she was once married, once had a child. At Christmas the people she works with draw names, and every year she receives a sampler of cheeses and meats. She imagines the giver buying one for her and one for some maiden aunt. There are days at the office when Ruth feels invisible. Coworkers look right through h
er as they pass her desk. She believes that if she actually did disappear and the police needed an artist’s sketch, none of them could provide a distinguishing detail.

  Ruth walks into the living room, kneels in front of the set of encyclopedias on the bottom bookshelf. When she was pregnant, her mother insisted on making a trip to Columbia to bring a shiny new stroller, huge discount bags of diapers, and the encyclopedias bought years ago for Ruth.

  They’re for your child now, her mother had said. That’s why I saved them.

  But Ruth’s child lived only four hours. She was still hazy from the anesthesia when Richard had sat on the hospital bed, his face pale and haggard, and told her they had lost the baby. In her drugged mind she envisioned a child in the new stroller, wheeled into some rarely used hospital hallway and then forgotten.

  Tell them they have to find him, she’d said, and tried to get up, propping herself on her elbows for a moment before they gave way and darkness closed around her.

  Richard had wanted to try again. We’ve got to move on with our lives, he’d said. But she’d taken the stroller and bags of diapers to Goodwill. In the end only Richard moved on, taking a job in Atlanta. Soon they were seeing each other on fewer and fewer weekends, solitude returning to her life like a geographical place, a landscape neither hostile nor welcoming, just familiar.

  That their marriage had come apart was not unusual. All the books and advice columnists said so. Their marriage had become a tangled exchange of sorrow. Ruth knew now that it had been she, not Richard, who too easily had acquiesced to the idea that it always would be so, that solitude was better because it allowed no mirror for one’s grief. They could have had another child, could have tried to heal themselves. She’d been the unwilling one.

  Ruth rubs her index finger over the encyclopedia spines, reading the time-darkened letters like braille. She pulls the J volume out, a cracking sound as she opens it. She finds the entry, a black-and-white photograph of a big cat resting in a tree. Range: South and Central America. Once found in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, but now only rare sightings near the U.S.-Mexico border.

  There is no mention of South Carolina, not even Florida. Ruth wonders for the first time if perhaps she only imagined seeing the jaguar in the schoolbook. Perhaps it was a mountain lion or bobcat. She shelves the encyclopedia and turns on her computer, types jaguar South Carolina extinct into the search engine. After an hour, Ruth has found three references to Southeast United States and several more to Florida and Louisiana, but no reference to South Carolina. She walks into the kitchen and opens the phone book. She calls the state zoo’s main number and asks to speak to the director.

  “He’s not here today,” the switchboard operator answers, “but I can connect you to his assistant, Dr. Timrod.”

  The phone rings twice and a man’s voice answers.

  Ruth is unsure how to say what she wants, unsure of what it is that she wants, other than some kind of confirmation. She tells her name and that she’s interested in jaguars.

  “We have no jaguar,” Dr. Timrod says brusquely. “The closest would be in Atlanta.”

  Ruth asks if they were ever in South Carolina.

  “In a zoo?”

  “No, in the wild.”

  “I’ve never heard that,” Dr. Timrod says. “I associate jaguars with a more tropical environment, but I’m no expert on big cats.” His voice is reflective now, more curious than impatient. “My field is ornithology. Most people think parakeets are tropical too, but once they were in South Carolina.”

  “So it’s possible,” Ruth says.

  “Yes, I guess it’s possible. I do know buffalo were here. Elk, pumas, wolves. Why not a jaguar.”

  “Could you help me find out?”

  As Dr. Timrod pauses, she imagines his office—posters of animals on the walls, the floor concrete just like the big cats’ cages. Maybe a file cabinet and bookshelves but little else. She suspects the room reeks of pipe smoke.

  “Maybe,” Dr. Timrod says. “I can ask Leslie Winters. She’s our large animal expert, though elephants are her main interest. If she doesn’t know, I’ll try to do a little research on it myself.”

  “Can I come by the zoo tomorrow to see what you’ve found?”

  Dr. Timrod laughs. “You’re rather persistent.”

  “Not usually,” Ruth says.

  “I’ll be in my office from ten to eleven. Come then.”

  Ruth calls her office and tells the secretary she will be out one more day.

  The needs of the dead have exhausted her. Too tired to cook or go out, Ruth instead finishes unpacking and takes a long bath. As she lies in the warm, neck-deep water, she closes her eyes and summons the drawing of the jaguar. She tries to remember more. Was the jaguar drawn as if moving or standing still? Were its eyes looking toward her or toward the end of the page? Were there parakeets perched in the palmetto trees above? She cannot recall.

  Ruth does not rest well that night. She has trouble falling asleep and when she finally does she dreams of rows of bleached tombstones with no names, no dates etched upon them. In the dream one of these tombstones marks the grave of her son, but she does not know which one.

  Driving through rush-hour traffic the next morning, Ruth remembers how she made the nurse bring her son to her when the drugs had worn off enough that she understood what lost really meant. She’d looked into her child’s face so she might never forget it, stroking the wisps of hair blond and fine as corn silk. Her son’s eyes were closed. After a few seconds the nurse had gently but firmly taken the child from her arms. The nurse had been kind, as had the doctor, but she knows they have forgotten her child by now, that his brief life has merged with hundreds of other children who lived and died under their watch. She knows that only two people remember that child and that now even she has trouble recalling what he looked like and the same must be true for Richard. She knows there is not a single soul on earth who could tell her the color of her son’s eyes.

  At the zoo, the woman in the admission booth gives Ruth a map, marking Dr. Timrod’s office with an X.

  “You’ll have to go through part of the zoo, so here’s a pass,” the woman says, “just in case someone asks.”

  Ruth accepts the pass but opens her pocketbook. “I may stay a while.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” the woman says and waves her in.

  Ruth follows the map past the black rhino and the elephants, past the lost-and-found booth where the Broad River flows only a few yards from the concrete path. She walks over a wooden bridge and finds the office, a brick building next to the aviary.

  Ruth is twenty minutes early so sits down on a nearby bench, light-headed with fatigue though she hasn’t walked more than a quarter mile, all of it downhill. On the other side of the walkway a wire-mesh cage looms large as her living room. THE ANDEAN CONDOR IS THE LARGEST FLYING BIRD IN THE WORLD. LIKE ITS AMERICAN RELATIVES, VULTUR GRYPHUS IS VOICELESS, the sign on the cage says.

  The condor perches on a blunt-limbed tree, its head and neck thick with wrinkles. When the bird spreads its wings, Ruth wonders how the cage can contain it. She lowers her gaze, watches instead the people who pass in front of her. Her stomach clenches, and she realizes she hasn’t eaten since lunchtime yesterday.

  She is about to go find a refreshment stand when she sees the child. A woman dressed in jeans and a blue T-shirt drags him along as if a prisoner, their wrists connected by a cord of white plastic. As they pass between her and the condor, Ruth stares intently at the blue eyes and blond hair, the pale unsmiling face. She estimates his height and weight as she fumbles with her pocketbook snap, sifts through the flyers till she finds the one she’s searching for. She looks and knows it is him. She snaps the pocketbook shut as the woman and child cross the wooden bridge.

  Ruth rises to follow and the world suddenly blurs. The wire mesh of the condor’s cage wavers as if about to give way. She grips the bench with her free hand. In a few moments she regains her balance, but the woman and child are
out of sight.

  Ruth walks rapidly, then is running, the pocketbook slapping against her side, the flyer gripped in her hand like a sprinter’s baton. She crosses the wooden bridge and finally spots the woman and child in front of the black rhino’s enclosure.

  “Call the police,” Ruth says to the teenager in the lost-and-found booth. “That child,” she says, gasping for breath as she points to the boy, “that child has been kidnapped. Hurry, they’re about to leave.”

  The teenager looks at her incredulously, but he picks up the phone and asks for security. Ruth walks past the woman and child, putting herself between them and the park’s exit. She does not know what she will say or do, only that she will not let them pass by her.

  But the woman and child do not try to leave, and soon Ruth sees the teenager with two gray-clad security guards, guns holstered on their hips, jogging toward her.

  “There,” Ruth shouts, pointing as she walks toward the child. As Ruth and the security guards converge, the woman in the blue T-shirt and the child turn to face them.

  “What is this?” the woman asks as the child clutches her leg.

  “Look,” Ruth says, thrusting the flyer into the hands of the older of the two men. The security guard looks at it, then at the child.

  “What is this? What are you doing?” the woman asks, her voice frantic now.

  The child is whimpering, still holding the woman’s leg. The security guard looks up from the flyer.

  “I don’t see the resemblance,” he says, looking at Ruth.

  He hands the flyer to his partner.

  “This child would be ten years old,” the younger man says.