Wattie didn’t seem to get her own gruesome pun. She patted my back until I stopped coughing, and then she kept right on talking.
“She told me her daddy had some bad business troubles. Ruinous, she said. As soon as his trunk was packed, he was heading for Charleston. It was smart, you know, because it gave the town something to be talking about. The Birch fortune in jeopardy. It made sense that the next few days Birchie would be so pale and jumpy. ‘Already an old maid,’ people said. ‘What’s she going to do now, if her daddy really has lost it all?’ Birch money kept this town alive in a lot of ways. And yet people can’t help but ugly-like a riches-to-rags story, seems to me.”
She poured another slug of bourbon directly into the dregs in the mug. Added honey. Stirred.
“When she said he had died of a heart attack in Charleston, people believed her. She was Emily Birch. Of course they believed her. It helped that he had always been a portly, red-faced fellow. Big-bellied, you know? And so proud! Kept everything bottled. Dropping dead of a heart attack sounded like exactly what he’d do. It helped that the man didn’t have a single close friend in this whole world. He kept himself and Birchie separate, lording like King Poop up on his high, brown mountain.” That surprised me. I’d heard Ellis Birch described as a proud man, but usually in reverent terms and tones. Wattie paused long enough to drink the thick, sweet liquid, making a face in spite of all the honey. “Off Birchie went to Charleston. Everyone thought, you know, that she would bring her daddy back, put him in the Birch family crypt, right across the street. But she didn’t return. Not for weeks. She sent word that his business problems were keeping her in the city and that she’d buried him there. It didn’t make perfect sense, but it made enough. There’s plenty of Birches buried in Charleston.
“When she did finally come home, no one knew if she was rich or poor. It was exciting for them, like watching a moving picture. My mother went to collect her at the train station, and I went, too. Birchie had us take her right to Floyd Briggs’s store. He was in there, behind his counter. Lots of people were there. More people were there that day than would fit in that store, if you listened to the stories folks told after.
“Birchie—she was still called Miss Emily then—she walked right up to Floyd, and between us, he wasn’t all that much to look at. You’ve seen his portrait. Gingery fellow, pale as the moon. But he had some chin, you know. Some gumption. He’d been the hardest of her suitors to run off. He had a way with words, and he used to slip her poetry in church, until her daddy caught wind and nipped it. He had a sweet, kind heart.
“She walked right in and she said, ‘You wanted to marry me once.’ And he said, ‘I remember.’ And she said, ‘Daddy said you were only after our money. Was that true?’ Nobody in that store was breathing. Truth be told, there were only six or seven folks, but I was one of them, so I know, and I tell you—no one breathed. He said, ‘No, ma’am. That was not true.’
“Now, I knew that the Birch fortune was fine. Never had been in any danger. But Floyd surely didn’t know, no more than anybody else in Birchville.
“He was a moonfaced greengrocer, and she was already stout, an old maid with lines around her eyes. But when he dropped to one knee and took her hand, right there, and he asked her in front of God and everybody? Well. They were Bogey and Bacall.
“That was all anybody talked about. It made her daddy’s death second-page news. Then the town come to find out she had saved the family fortune after all. Some folks said her daddy had actually done something that saved it, right before he passed. You know, back then fellows didn’t like to think about a lady doing money things. Well! That took up two Sundays’ worth of jawing. Then someone had a baby, and someone’s wife ran off with a vacuum salesman, and the United States put a satellite up right into space. Elvis joined the army. There were always new things to talk about. So that was that.”
I tried to imagine what it must have felt like, knowing. Watching nothing happen. Birchie marrying immediately, not willing to waste a day, because any day could be the day that she was caught. But instead time passed and the hot summer did its work. There was the faint smell of a possum dead under the house, and then the smell of fall leaves, and then nothing.
Years rolled by. She’d had a baby. Buried her husband and then her son. Let decades’ worth of furniture and books and boxes do the work of burying her father. By the time I was a little girl, neither of them so much as flinched when I asked if I could go and play with all the old things stuffed up in the attic.
I said, “You never asked her why?”
“I helped her when she asked me, baby, and that was all. I loved her. I still love her,” Wattie said. Her full mouth twisted down in a way that telegraphed an understatement. “I never did care for him much.”
Something like a laugh got out of me. A disbelieving and exhausted noise. If it hadn’t been for Digby, I’d have poured the rest of the Blanton’s into my mug. Maybe directly into my mouth. As it was, I sat clutching my cooling tea like it was a lifeline.
She pushed her own sticky mug away, like she was finished. Finished drinking, finished talking. She put her hands on the table, preparing to push back and go to bed. I grabbed her arm, pausing her.
“Why would you help her hide a body and not even ask why? Why would you?” In the bedroom she had told me that if their roles were reversed, if Wattie had Lewy bodies and Birchie were still hale, Birchie would care for her just the same. How did she know? What kind of love was this, a love that didn’t sell itself out, no matter what? “What did she do for you?”
Wattie patted my hand, but then she stood up anyway. When I did not let go, she put her own hand on my head.
“Sweet girl. I’ve flat adored you since you were nothin’ but a bump inside your mother, but that is not any of your business. Your grandmother and I? We have been on this earth a long, long while. We came up in a different time than you. Some nights these southern trees around here bore some strange fruit. You understand me? Now, I don’t talk about that mess. Not with pretty little white girls whose foot never touched the earth until years after Dr. King got buried in it. I will only say this: Every minute of my life, your grandmother has been my good and loyal friend.”
Her hand stayed on my head, like she was blessing me, and her large brown eyes were solemn and serious. I wanted to ask her a thousand questions, but she’d made it plain that I was not allowed. It was like I heard the echo of a distant door closing, so far away that the sound had had to travel years and years to come to me.
She was right. I would never know what her life had been like eighty years ago, or seventy, or fifty. Or even now. My arms went around myself involuntarily, holding a brown boy I flat adored, though he was only a bump inside me.