The Steep and Thorny Way(46)

“And Joe was . . .” I cleared my throat. “He was in the car?”

“I didn’t know who was in there at first, but then the deputy’s car came driving around the bend—he must have seen my bicycle sitting there and worried. His headlights shone against the Model T, and I saw Joe’s head pop up from the driver’s side. The next thing I knew, some other fellow was jumping out of the car, pulling up his pants, and running off into the trees, while the deputy was yelling at Joe to get out of the vehicle.”

“All right, all right.” I readjusted my own hat on my head with a crinkle of the straw. “That’s all I need to know about that.”

“I’ve felt guilty about Joe ever since.” She pursed her lips and sniffed.

I squinted at her. “Why do you feel guilty about him?”

Again, she braced herself against the trunk of the birch. “I watched as he stumbled out of the car while buttoning up his own trousers. He dropped to his knees and begged Deputy Fortaine to keep quiet about what he saw, for the sake of his father. ‘He’s a man of the cloth,’ he kept saying over and over with tears rolling down his cheeks. ‘People will run him out of town for raising a boy like me.’”

“But the deputy didn’t care,” I huffed. “Did he?”

“Oh, but he did.” Mildred nodded. “He took pity on Joe and let him go. He said he was going to pretend he didn’t see anything there, and he told Joe to drive straight home.”

“Even though Joe had been drinking?”

“I don’t know if he’d been drinking. He sure sounded sober when he was caught in those headlights and was begging for his freedom.”

I squeezed my head between my hands, pressing the heels of my palms against the bones of my temples. “Then . . . then how did other people find out about Joe? Joe said he thinks he was put in jail mainly because of what he was caught doing with that boy, not because of my father’s death.”

Mildred flopped her fedora back over her head.

“Did they find the boy he was with?” I asked. “The boy from the party?”

“I blabbed about Joe,” she said, ignoring my question, her eyes cast downward. “Sheriff Rink was over at our house the next day and told us about Joe running the car into your father.”

“You told Sheriff Rink what you saw?”

She nodded. “I always enjoyed Joe’s good looks, but what I found him doing . . .” She shook her head, as if she still didn’t understand what she’d witnessed that Christmas Eve. “And then the idea of him killing your father . . . I blurted out, ‘I hope Deputy Fortaine told you he found Joe and some other fellow with their pants down together.’”

She wrapped her arms around herself and fell silent with an abruptness that made me again aware of the band and the picnic. All the Fourth of July noises rushed back into my ears.

“I bet they treated Joe worse than they treat most people arrested for manslaughter,” said Mildred. “He was just sixteen at the time of his arrest, I think, and I probably made his life hell.”

I slid my hands down my face to my cheeks, and a damp chill rose to the surface of my skin. I thought of the bruises I’d seen on Joe’s ribs, and the scar near his eye, the healed wound on his lip.

“Maybe . . .” She sniffed again, her eyes rimmed in red. “Maybe I should have just kept riding my bicycle after your father. Maybe it’s my fault that he died. I got so distracted with Joe, I didn’t warn your father about that terrible, premonitory pain. And if Joe would have just stayed with that boy without my bicycle attracting the deputy . . . Maybe that’s why your father’s storming into my house these past few nights. Maybe it is because of me, not you.”

I struggled to find my voice. “H-h-how long did it take you to recover from that premonition pain before you hopped onto your bicycle?”

“I don’t remember,” she said. “A little while.”

“Do you think my father made his delivery before he encountered Joe?”

“Why does that even matter, Hanalee? Who cares about that delivery?”

“I just want to fill in all the missing pieces. There’s talk of a doc being involved, and I don’t know if my father means ‘Dr. Koning’ or ‘the Dry Dock.’”

“Ask your father.”

I nodded. “I will. Tonight.”

“If he’s not gone by tomorrow, I swear, Mama will summon that Spiritualist—”

“I said, I’ll ask him tonight,” I said with a sting to my voice.

“Good. See as you do.” Mildred wiped her eyes with the tips of her fingers and staggered back over to the festivities.





CHAPTER 16





NOBLE DUST


UP AHEAD, TO THE RIGHT OF THE church, stood the wrought-iron archway that marked the entrance to the cemetery in which we’d buried my father two days after Christmas 1921. Joe had sat behind bars in the local jail while his father presided over the memorial service with a voice that cracked with emotion. Uncle Clyde and Fleur’s mama, both friends with my mother since they were all children, had to revive my mother when she fainted by the graveside, and I remembered Uncle Clyde lifting Mama’s head, whisking smelling salts beneath her nose, and murmuring, “I’m here, Greta. I’m here. You’re not alone.”