Wild Orchids Read online

  I was seven when my cousin Ronny drowned and I wasn’t sad because I knew that Cousin Ronny had been a brute. He’d drowned while terrorizing a four-year-old girl. He’d grabbed her doll, run into the pond, and proceeded to dismember it, throwing the body parts into the murky water, all while the little girl stood on the bank, crying and begging. But as Cousin Ronny ran into the deep water, he disturbed a snapping turtle that bit his big toe, and he and what was left of the doll went under, where he hit his head on a rock and knocked himself unconscious. By the time anybody realized he wasn’t pretending to be dead (Cousin Ronny was a great one for crying wolf ) he actually was dead.

  When I was told that Cousin Ronny had died—which meant that he’d no longer be around to bully me and the other little kids—all I felt was relief. And I was sure that Uncle Clyde would be glad, too, because he was always yelling at Ronny that he was the worst kid in the world and that he, Uncle Clyde, should have “cut it off” before he’d made such an evil son.

  But after Ronny died, Uncle Clyde went into a state of bereavement that lasted the rest of his life. And he wasn’t the only full-time mourner in my family. I had three aunts, two uncles, and four cousins who were also in lifelong mourning. A miscarriage, a chopped-off limb, a broken engagement, whatever, were all reason enough to put life on hold forever.

  I grew up praying hard that nothing truly bad ever happened to me. I didn’t want to have to spend decades drinking and crying about the tragedy that had blighted my existence.

  When I met Pat’s extended family and saw that they were all laughing and happy, I shook my head at the irony of it all. So many tragedies had been thrust on my family, yet here were people who had been blessed—without tragedy—for generations. Was it their church-going ways that had made their lives so free of catastrophe? No, my uncle Horace had gone to church for years, but after his second wife ran off with a deacon, he’d never entered a church again.

  About the third time Pat and I were in bed together, back when I still felt superior, as though my hard childhood had taught me more about life than her soft one had taught her, I mentioned this phenomenon, that her family had experienced no tragedies.

  “What do you mean?” she asked, so I told her about Uncle Clyde and Cousin Ronny who had drowned. I left out the parts about the doll, the turtle, and Uncle Clyde’s drinking. Instead, I used my natural-born gift for storytelling to make him sound like a man who loved deeply.

  But Pat said, “What about his other children? Didn’t he love them ‘deeply’?”

  I sighed. “Sure he did, but his love for Cousin Ronny overrode everything else.” This last bit was difficult for me. I’m cursed with a clear memory and I could almost hear again the ugly fights that used to rage between Uncle Clyde and his bully of a son. Truthfully, before the boy drowned I never saw any love between Uncle Clyde and Cousin Ronny.

  But to Pat I put on my best I’m-older-than-you look (by three months) and I’ve-seen-more-of-the-world-than-you (by the time Pat was eighteen she’d been to forty-two states on long driving vacations with her parents, while I had been out of my home state only twice) and told her that she and her family couldn’t understand my uncle Clyde’s feelings because they’d never experienced true tragedy.

  That’s when she told me she couldn’t have children. When she was eight she’d been riding her bike near a construction site and had fallen. A piece of rebar, embedded in concrete, had pierced her lower abdomen and gone through her tiny prepubescent uterus.

  She went on to tell me how her mother had lost her first husband and infant son in a train accident. “She and her husband were sitting together and she’d just handed him the baby when a runaway truck hit them,” Pat said. “My mother wasn’t touched but her husband and baby son were killed instantly. Her husband was decapitated.” She looked at me. “His head fell onto her lap.”

  We lay there in bed, both of us naked, and looked at each other. I was young and in bed with a girl I was in love with, but I didn’t see her beautiful bare breasts or the soft, perfect curve of her hip. Her words had shocked me to the core. I felt like a medieval man hearing for the first time that the earth wasn’t flat.

  I couldn’t reconcile that sweet woman who was Pat’s mother with the woman who’d had a severed head drop onto her lap. And Pat. If one of my female cousins had had a hysterectomy at eight years old her life would have stopped then and there. Every family gathering would have had everyone clucking in sympathy. “Pooooorrr Pat,” they would have called her.

  I’d known Pat and her family for months, and I’d met three grandparents, four aunts, two uncles, and an uncountable number of cousins. No one had mentioned Pat’s tragedy or her mother’s.

  “My mother had five miscarriages before she had me and they removed her uterus an hour after I was born,” Pat said.

  “Why?” I asked, blinking, still in shock.

  “I was breech so I was Caesarean and the doctor had been called from a party so…so his hand wasn’t steady. Her uterus was accidently cut and they couldn’t stop the bleeding.” Pat got out of bed, picked up my T-shirt off the floor, and pulled it on over her head, where it reached to her knees.

  The irony of this matter of uteruses and families flooded my brain. In my family girls got pregnant early and often. So why were my uncles able to reproduce themselves lavishly, but Pat’s parents had only one child and no hope of grandchildren?

  As I watched Pat dress, I knew there was something else in what she’d just told me about her birth. “A party? Are you saying that the doctor who delivered you was drunk?” People like Pat’s family didn’t have drunken doctors who “accidently” destroyed a woman’s uterus.

  Pat nodded in answer to my question.

  “What about your father?” I whispered, meaning, Did he have any tragedy attached to him?

  “Macular degeneration. He’ll be blind in a few more years.”

  At that I saw tears form in her eyes. To hide them, she went into the bathroom and closed the door.

  That was the turning point. After that day, I changed my attitude toward life. I stopped being smug. I stopped feeling that only my family had experienced “true life.” And I relinquished my biggest fear: that if something truly awful happened to me, I’d have to stop living and retreat into myself. You go on, I told myself. No matter what, you go on.

  And I thought I’d managed to do that. After that kid ran his car into Pat’s mother and killed her, I tried to be an adult. Right after it happened, I thought that maybe if I heard the details of her death I’d feel better, so I went to a young policeman standing by the wreckage and asked him what happened. Maybe he didn’t know I was related to the deceased by marriage, or maybe he was just callous. He told me what the kid who’d killed her had said. “She was just an old woman,” he’d said, as though Pat’s mother had been insignificant.

  There was a funeral, a nice Presbyterian funeral, where people politely wept, where Pat leaned on me, and where her father aged by the minute.

  Three weeks after the funeral, we all seemed to be back to normal. Pat returned to teaching in her inner city school, I went back to the night school where I taught English to people trying to get their green card, and back to my day job of writing what I hoped would become a great work of literature and give me immortality—and a top slot on the New York Times Bestseller List. Pat’s father hired a full-time housekeeper and spent his evenings on the porch repairing his neighbor’s appliances, something he planned to do as long as his eyesight held out. A year after the funeral, everyone seemed to have accepted the loss of Pat’s mother as “God’s will.” True, there was an empty place that her absence left behind, and she was spoken of often, but her passing was accepted.

  I thought it was accepted. But I also thought I was the only one who felt old-fashioned, white-hot rage at the loss of someone so good. I seemed to see things that no one else did. There was a little hole on the arm of the couch where the stitching had come apart. It wasn’t more than a half inch
long, but I saw it and thought how Pat’s mother would have hated that little hole.

  At Christmas, everyone except me was jolly and laughing and exclaiming in delight over their gifts. It had been over a year since Pat’s mother’s needless death and I was still holding the anger inside me. I hadn’t told Pat but I hadn’t written a word in that year. Not that what I’d written in the previous years had been worth anything, but at least I’d been making an effort. I’d had three agents but none of them could get a publishing house to buy what I wrote. “Beautifully written,” I heard over and over. “But not for us.”

  But “beautiful” or not, my writing wasn’t good enough in the eyes of New York editors to be published—and it wasn’t good enough in the eyes of my wife. “Not bad,” she’d say. “Actually, it’s not bad at all.” Then she’d ask what I wanted for dinner. She never spoke a word of criticism, but I knew I wasn’t reaching her.

  That Christmas, the second one after Pat’s mother’s death, I was sitting on the sofa in front of the fire and running my fingertips over the little hole in the seam. To my left I could hear the women in the kitchen, all of them chattering and quietly laughing. Behind me in the den the TV was blaring and the males were watching some sporting contest. The kids were on the closed-in porch at the back of the house, counting their loot and eating too much candy.

  I was worried that I was becoming like my father’s relatives. What was wrong with me that I couldn’t get over the death of my mother-in-law? Couldn’t get over the waste of it? The injustice? The kid who’d killed her turned out to be the son of a rich man; a battalion of lawyers had freed him on a technicality.

  I got up and put a log on the fire and while I squatted there, Pat’s father came into the room. He didn’t see me because his eyesight had deteriorated until he was only able to see in a direct line in front of him.

  He was holding a little pink basket with a hinged lid. As he sat down on the end of the couch, just where I’d been sitting, he opened it. It was a sewing basket, the back of the lid padded to make a pincushion that held several pre-threaded needles. I watched him remove a needle, his old hands running down the long thread to check for a knot at the end. His hands were shaking a bit.

  He set the sewing basket beside him, and then, using what eyesight he still had and his left hand, he searched along the arm of the couch.

  I knew what he was looking for: that little hole in the couch cover that Pat’s mother had made.

  But he couldn’t find the hole. There were tears blocking his limited vision and his hands were shaking too badly to feel anything. On my knees, I went to the other side of the arm and put my hands over his. He didn’t express any surprise when I touched him, and he offered no explanation for what he was doing.

  Together, slowly, for my hands were trembling and my eyes, too, were blurred, he and I sewed up the hole. A two-minute job took fifteen minutes, and during that time neither of us spoke. We could hear the other people in the rooms around us, but it was as though they were far away.

  When at last the hole was closed, I put my finger on the thread and, bending, Pat’s father cut the thread with his teeth. For a second his lips touched my fingertip.

  Maybe it was that touch. Or maybe it was what we’d just done together. Or maybe it was just my desperate need for a man in my life who didn’t love his truck more than he loved any human. Still on my knees, I dropped my head onto Pat’s father’s lap, and I began to cry. As he stroked my hair, I felt his silent tears fall onto the side of my face.

  I don’t know how long we stayed like that. If any of the Pendergasts saw us, no one ever mentioned it to me, not even Pat—but then they were a very polite family.

  After a while, my tears began to slow and, as all those women’s magazines said, I felt “better.” Not good, but there was a knot in my chest that had been loosened. Maybe now it could go away, I thought.

  “I’d like to kill that bastard kid,” Pat’s father said and I don’t know how to explain this, but what he said made me laugh. I’d been surrounded for over a year by polite, nonviolent grief, but I couldn’t feel that way. Twice, I’d come close to calling one of my uncles. He’d know someone who would “take out” that kid for a fee. I was tempted, but I knew that a revenge killing wouldn’t bring Pat’s mother back.

  “Me, too,” I whispered as I got up, wiping my face on the sleeve of my new Christmas shirt. He and I were alone in the room. When a log in the fire burned through and fell, I turned toward it. But then, on impulse, I put my hand on his shoulder, bent, and kissed his forehead. For a moment he held my wrist with both his hands, and I thought his tears were going to start again, but they didn’t. Instead, he smiled. “I’m glad my daughter married you,” he said, and no praise before or since has ever meant as much to me as those words. They broke something inside of me, something hard and suffocating that had taken up residence in my chest.

  An hour later, I was the life of the party. I was Mr. Entertainment. I was laughing and joking and telling stories that had everyone howling. No one, not even Pat, had ever seen me that way. I’d told her that I’d learned to “sing for my supper” when I was a kid, but I hadn’t elaborated. The full story was that my mother said that since my father’s eleven brothers had been the ones to get her husband thrown into prison, they could take turns being a father to me. For my entire childhood I was moved every three months from one uncle to the next. “Here comes Punishment,” my cousins would shout when my mother drove me from one house or trailer to the next. She’d push me toward a door, my one suitcase with all my worldly possessions at my feet, and give my shoulder a little squeeze, the only sign of affection she ever showed me. I’d not see her again until the three months were up and she delivered me to the next uncle. Even if they lived next door to each other, my mother made a point of driving me.

  Over the years I’d learned that I couldn’t compete with my cousins’ fighting skills or their native ability to operate all large machinery that was painted either yellow or green, but I had a talent they didn’t have: storytelling. Lord only knows where I got it, although an ancient great-aunt told me that my grandfather was the best liar she’d ever met, so maybe it came from him. In fact, I was so different, one of my uncles said that if I didn’t look like a Newcombe he’d swear I wasn’t kin to them at all.

  Out of necessity, I’d learned to entertain. When tempers got too frayed, someone would poke me and say, “Tell us a story, Ford.”

  So I learned to tell stories that made people laugh, that scared them, or just enthralled them. The evening after I cried with my head on Pat’s father’s lap, I turned on like I hadn’t done since I’d walked out of my uncle’s house, bound for college on a partial scholarship and a student loan.

  The next day, in the car, as we started the long drive home from her father’s house, Pat said, “Wow. What happened to you last night?”

  I didn’t say much in answer to her question. Actually, I didn’t say much on the whole trip back because I was thinking about what Pat’s father had said, that he’d like to kill that kid. How could a man who couldn’t see well enough to thread a needle kill someone? One thing for sure was that if he could pull it off, no one would suspect him.

  And what kind of punishment would a kid like that deserve? Just sneaking up behind him and shooting him wouldn’t be enough. He’d need to suffer like the people who’d loved Pat’s mother suffered. He’d have to have what he loved most on earth taken away from him. But what did a kid like that love? Booze? His dad who got him off?

  And what about Pat’s mother? I thought. What about her spirit? Did her spirit, the essence of her, have to be taken off the earth just because her body was gone? What if her husband or daughter needed help? Would she be there? And what was the spirit world like anyway? Was her decapitated first husband there? Her infant son? What about the spirits of the babies she’d miscarried?

  Hey! What about the drunken doctor who “accidently” cut up her uterus? Could her bodiless spirit do
anything about him?

  By the time we got home that night, Pat was looking at me strangely, but then she’d often said that the harder I thought the quieter I got. After I’d had a sandwich and brushed my teeth, I thought I just might go to my typewriter and put a few of my ideas on paper.

  Not that I—a real writer—would ever, in a million years actually write a crime-slash-ghost-slash-revenge novel. But, still, maybe I could someday use the ideas in one of my good stories. You know, the great literary masterpiece that was going to win me a National Book Award and a Pulitzer. And spend multiple weeks on all the bestseller lists.

  When I got to my typewriter, set up in an alcove off the living room, I was startled to see that I’d left it on. I wasn’t usually forgetful. There was a note on the keys. “I put three sandwiches in the ’frig. Don’t drink the beer; it’ll make you sleepy. If you’re still at it by four tomorrow afternoon, I’ll call you in sick.”

  Normally, I might have cried in gratitude to have a wife who understood me so well, but I was all cried out. She’d put clean paper in the machine and all I had to do was start punching in letters.

  What’s the big deal? She was just an old woman were the first words I typed, and after that, they just seemed to pour out of me. The first time I had the ghost of the murdered woman enter the story, I thought, I can’t do this. This isn’t literature. But then I remembered something I’d heard a best-selling writer say in a speech. “You can’t choose what you write. No one comes down to you, sitting on a pink cloud, and says, ‘I’m going to give you the ability to write. So which talent do you want? The Jane Austin model that lives forever, or the kind that makes you lots of money while you’re alive but dies when you do?’ No one gives you that choice. You just take whatever talent you’re given and thank God four times a day for giving you any talent at all.”