The rifle, though, had been deliberately pitched. We could see where she stopped, the depth of her footprints where she heaved it away from her as if it were something suddenly and terribly abhorrent.
After that, there was nothing to show that she’d hesitated a single second. Her footprints went like bullets, straight down to the pond and into the silent, silver-green water,
As with most farm ponds dredged for irrigation, the bottom dropped off steeply from the edge to discourage mosquito larvae.
“How deep is it there?” Dwight asked when we arrived breathless and panting.
“Twelve feet,” said Sammy Junior. “And she never learned how to swim.”
His voice didn’t break, but his chest was heaving, his face got red, and tears streamed from his eyes. “Why? In God’s name, why, Dwight? Helen? Deb’rah? You all know Uncle J.C. near ’bout worships Mama, And we’ve always teased her that J.C. stood for Jesus Christ the way she’s catered to him.”
It was almost dark before they found Beulah’s body.
No one tolled the heavy iron bell at the home place. The old way of alerting the neighborhood to fire or death has long since been replaced by the telephone, but the reaction hasn’t changed much in two hundred years.
By the time that second ambulance passed down the lane, this one on its way to the state’s medical examiner in Chapel Hill, cars filled the yard and lined the ditch banks on either side of the road. And there was no place in Helen’s kitchen or dining room to set another plate of food. It would have taken a full roll of tinfoil to cover all the casseroles, biscuits, pies, deviled eggs, and platters of fried chicken, sliced turkey, and roast pork that had been brought in by shocked friends and relatives.
My aunt Zell arrived, white-faced and grieving, the last of three adventuresome country girls who’d gone off to Goldsboro during World War II to work at the air base. I grew up on stories of those war years: how J.C. had been sent over by his and Beulah’s parents to keep an eye on my mother, Beulah, and Aunt Zell and protect them from the dangers of a military town, how they’d tried to fix him up with a WAC from New Jersey, the Saturday night dances, the innocent flirtations with that steady stream of young airmen who passed through the Army Air Forces Technical Training School at Seymour Johnson Field on their way to the airfields of Europe.
It wasn’t till I was eighteen, the summer between high school and college, the summer Mother was dying, that I learned it hadn’t all been lighthearted laughter.
We’d been sorting through a box of old black-and-white snapshots that Mother was determined to date and label before she died. Among the pictures of her or Aunt Zell or Beulah perched on the wing of a bomber or jitterbugging with anonymous, interchangeable airmen, there was one of Beulah and a young man. They had their arms around each other, and there was a sweet solemnity in their faces that separated this picture from the other clowning ones.
“Who’s that?” I asked, and Mother sat staring into the picture for so long that I had to ask again.
“His name was Donald,” she finally replied. Then her face took on an earnest look I’d come to know that summer, the look that meant I was to be entrusted with another secret, another scrap of her personal history that she couldn’t bear to take to her grave untold even though each tale began, “Now you mustn’t ever repeat this, but-”
“Donald Farraday came from Norwood, Nebraska,” she said. “Exactly halfway between Omaha and Lincoln on the Platte River. That’s what he always said. After he shipped out, Beulah used to look at the map and lay her finger halfway between Omaha and Lincoln and make Zell and me promise that we’d come visit her.”
“I thought Sam was the only one she ever dated seriously,” I protested.
“Beulah was the only one Sam ever dated seriously,” Mother said crisply. “He had his eye on her from the time she was in grade school and he and J.C. used to go hunting together. She wrote to him while he was fighting the Japs, but they weren’t going steady or anything. And she’d have never married Sam if Donald hadn’t died.”
“Oh,” I said, suddenly understanding the sad look that sometimes shadowed Beulah’s eyes when only minutes before she and Mother and Aunt Zell might have been giggling over some Goldsboro memory.
Donald Farraday was from a Nebraska wheat farm, Mother told me, on his way to fight in Europe. Beulah met him at a jitterbug contest put on by the canteen, and it’d been love at first sight. Deep and true and all-consuming. They had only sixteen days and fifteen nights together, but that was enough to know this wasn’t a passing wartime romance. Their values, their dreams, everything meshed.
“And they had so much fun together. You’ve never seen two people laugh so much over nothing. She didn’t even cry when he shipped out because she was so happy thinking about what marriage to him was going to be like after the war was over.”
“How did he die?”
“We never really heard,” said Mother. “She had two of the sweetest, most beautiful letters you could ever hope to read, and then nothing. That was near the end when fighting was so heavy in Italy-we knew he was in Italy though it was supposed to be secret. They weren’t married so his parents would’ve gotten the telegram, and of course, not knowing anything about Beulah, they couldn’t write her.”
“So what happened?”
“The war ended. We all came home, I married your daddy, Zell married James. Sam came back from the South Pacific and with Donald dead, Beulah didn’t care who she married.”
“Donna Sue!” I said suddenly.
“Yes,” Mother agreed. “Sue for me, Donna in memory of Donald. She doesn’t know about him, though, and don’t you ever tell her.” Her face was sad as she looked at the photograph in her hand of the boy and girl who’d be forever young, forever in love. “Beulah won’t let us mention his name, but I know she still grieves for what might have been.”
After Mother was gone, I never spoke to Beulah about what I knew. The closest I ever came was my junior year at Carolina when Jeff Creech dumped me for a psych major and I moped into the kitchen where Beulah and Aunt Zell were drinking coffee. I moaned about how my heart was broken and I couldn’t go on and Beulah had smiled at me, “You’ll go on, sugar. A woman’s body doesn’t quit just because her heart breaks.”
Sudden tears had misted Aunt Zell’s eyes-we Stephen-sons can cry over telephone commercials-and Beulah abruptly left,
“She was remembering Donald Farraday, wasn’t she?” I asked.
“Sue told you about him?”
“Yes,”
Aunt Zell had sighed then, “I don’t believe a day goes by that she doesn’t remember him.”
The endurance of Beulah’s grief had suddenly put Jeff Creech into perspective, and I realized with a small pang that losing him probably wasn’t going to blight the rest of my life.
As I put my arms around Aunt Zell, I thought of her loss: Mother gone, now Beulah. Only J.C. left to remember those giddy girlhood years. At least the doctors were cautiously optimistic that he’d recover from the shooting.
“Why did she do it?” I asked.
But Aunt Zell was as perplexed as the rest of us. The house was crowded with people who’d known and loved Beulah and J.C. all their lives, and few could recall a true cross word between older brother and younger sister.
“Oh, Mama’d get fussed once in a while when he’d try to keep her from doing something new,” said Donna Sue.
Every wake I’ve ever attended, the survivors always alternate between sudden paroxysms of tears and a need to remember and retell. For all the pained bewilderment and unanswered questions that night, Beulah’s wake was no different.
“Remember, Sammy, how Uncle J.C. didn’t want her to buy that place at the beach?”