The Accidentals Read online

  Dedication

  For Ruth

  Epigraph

  Accidental:

  Adjective:

  Happening by chance, undesignedly or unexpectedly; produced by accident: fortuitous

  Present by chance: nonessential

  —Oxford English Dictionary

  Noun:

  A bird found outside its normal geographic range, migration route, or season: vagrant

  —Merriam-Webster Dictionary

  Accidentals are the rarest of the rarities.

  —A Field Guide to the Birds: Giving Field Marks of All Species Found East of the Rockies

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. Olivia

  2. June

  3. Grace

  4. June

  5. Holly

  6. Grace

  7. Holly

  8. Grace

  9. Grace

  10. Frances

  11. Grace

  12. Frances

  13. Ed Mae

  14. Fred the Ambulance Driver

  15. June

  16. Holly

  17. Grace

  18. June

  19. Grace

  20. June

  21. Holly

  22. Grace

  23. June

  24. Grace

  25. June

  26. Ed Mae

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Praise

  Also by Minrose Gwin

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Olivia

  LISTEN HARD NOW, AND YOU CAN TELL WHAT THEY’RE saying. This morning, the cardinal. Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart, sweet. Then, two houses down, a mockingbird. Redemption, redemption.

  The sweetheart, that’s easy enough. Even now, in November, birds love sex and reproduction; it’s all they think about. But redemption? What can redemption possibly mean to a bird? A stocked feeder in this cold drizzle? Some suet? You tell me.

  Now, the shushes and tiptoes coming down the hall. The click of the front door when Holly takes the girls. Long after everyone’s out of the house, the voices. Someone calling out. A child replying, Stay, let me stay. A dog barks, high-pitched, angry.

  Cheer, cheer, cheer. I’m all ears, little wren.

  WHEN I OPEN my eyes, they burn and sting. It’s barely dawn outside, my head a full pitcher, the taste of burnt toast on my tongue. Why the hell can’t Holly get any decent liquor in this house?

  I don’t want to be sick when I do it.

  So I lie here flat on my back, waiting out Holly’s rot-gut cherry bounce, my feet torn loose from the tangled sheet. Whoopee, whoopee, somebody sings. Cheat, cheat, cheat. The cardinal again. I don’t have to ask him what he means.

  Tick tock. Now the wren perches on my head, scratches, makes a nest in my hair. Wrens will make a nest just about anywhere. I quake like a leaf in a freezing wind, then burn down to ash, my nightgown, the last one left in the drawer, soaked through. Why so hot? It’s November, for god’s sake. Somebody needs to do the wash, open a window.

  Who? Who?

  WHEN I WAKE up the second time, the headache is gone. It’s just the nausea now, not the hangover. I’m used to the queasiness, have had it for weeks. I know the drill. Ginger ale and saltines in bed. Throw them up and brush teeth. More ginger ale and saltines, more upchucking, more brushing. Then I can have my tea, whoopee.

  After that I can do it. After that I will do it.

  WHEN I WENT to the bank on Thursday and asked to cash out the savings, the manager came out with pursed lips and wanted to know where my husband, Holly McAlister Jr., was, why he hadn’t come too. I didn’t bat an eye. “Why, my poor husband’s lying half dead in University Hospital up in Jackson,” I sang out, quick as a chickadee. “He sent me to cash out the savings to pay for his treatments. My name’s on the account too,” I chirped. “I have every right.”

  I tried to keep the desperation out of my voice. My plan had taken weeks to hatch, and I was growing edgy. Time was of the essence. Just that morning, I’d gotten up from the bathtub to meet the dark circles around the nipples, the thickness at the middle. I was cutting it close.

  I knew I could get by with the lie. Opelika was a little scrub-pine town where everybody knew everybody else’s comings and goings; that’s what I hated most about it. But Holly and I had come in under the radar when he got the job as bookkeeper with the lumber mill. We didn’t fit. Not into the mill workers’ world of shotgun houses with their paper-thin walls and slag-eyed children or in the rarified social circles of the doctors and lawyers who lived in brick houses with fake columns and ate Sunday buffet at the Best Western in Gulfport. Even when the girls came, first Grace, then June, the four of us stayed to ourselves. They didn’t bring home schoolmates, probably because of me, and I didn’t go out unless absolutely necessary. Holly must have had his friends at the mill, but he never talked about them.

  Sometimes I drove through the Negro side of town just to feel at home. I loved the women’s late summer marigolds and fall mums, the sheets flapping like great white egrets on the lines. At dusk, after the supper dishes were done, the women perched on front porch steps, laughing and telling stories. I wanted to stop the car and sit down with them and talk about the old days of the war, how in the City we worked side by side deep into the hot summer nights, black and white shoulder to shoulder, building the landing boats that would bring our boys home, how at break time the older ones would speak of their children and the younger ones their boyfriends, and color was a detail not a world.

  Back then, I was running the main office at Higgins Boat Yard, handling everything like a drill sergeant, writing the checks, saying you come and you go, making it all work. I’d talked Mr. Higgins into hiring women and Negroes and even the old and crippled to work the assembly lines. Everybody, black and white, men and girls, old and young, got paid the same for the same work (I’d talked Higgins into that too). There were twenty-five thousand of us, spread across seven plants, the first in New Orleans to cross the color line. We worked around the clock to turn out the landing boats that would end up winning the war. Louisiana swamp boats. On the grounds where they were stored, the upside-down hulls stretched out in row upon row. At night under the stars and moon, they shone, like large animals asleep together, gathering strength for the task ahead.

  But now it was the fall of 1957. The war seemed like a dream. And here I was, blown off course and plunked down in this shoe box of a house, two kids and a husband who sashayed out the front door every morning and back in it every night, day in and day out, like the world was their oyster.

  When I drove by, the marigold women lowered their eyes, probably taking one look at me and seeing Trouble with a capital T, maybe thinking of that boy up in Money, shackled to a wagon wheel, beaten to a pulp just a couple of years ago for something silly he said to a woman who looked like me. Sometimes in my dreams I saw his face, more like a rotted pumpkin than an impish little boy with kestrel eyes.

  I HAD NO idea there was so much in the bank account. Apparently Holly had been squirreling it away while we pinched pennies, and for what? I ask you. We could have had ourselves some fun, maybe sent me up to Hattiesburg to finish out my degree at Southern or set us up in the Monteleone Hotel for Mardi Gras. How he’d saved $638.76 out of his paycheck I had no earthly idea. For a moment I thought maybe I’d misjudged him, maybe he was more interesting than I’d realized. Maybe he had a secret life, a mistress he bought perfumes and silk hose for. Oddly, the thought thrilled me.

  On Friday morning, right after
Holly left for work and the girls set out for school, I went out and sat down on the top step of our front porch to wait. I had packed a paper sack with everything they’d told me to pack, some pads and a belt, a change of clothes, the roll of cash that felt as warm and alive as a small animal in my palm. I crouched like a cat under the hummingbird feeder, keeping my head low, watching the street out of the corner of my eye. The birds were swooping in, fighting for the syrup, filling up for the long migration to a warmer place. Some had already left; their numbers dwindled every day.

  After a while, a rusty pickup clattered up and stopped. The driver, a gaunt woman in a man’s sweater, rolled down the window and looked hard at me. I came down the sidewalk and climbed in.

  “Hello,” I said.

  She looked at me strangely as if I’d said something completely unexpected. The vertical lines in her face called to mind the veins of a large sycamore leaf. The truck coughed and sputtered and died. She cranked it back up and gunned it, smoke billowing from the rear end.

  “You got the money?”

  “Yes.” I lifted the paper sack.

  “I’ll take it now.”

  I pulled out the roll of bills and handed it to her. She sat there slowly counting out the twenties, then put the roll between her legs and let out on the clutch.

  We rode along in silence. The truck’s engine was running ragged and the cab reeked of exhaust. After a few blocks, I began to shiver and quake. It started in my bottom, from the vibration, then traveled down to my knees, which began to knock together. I considered telling the woman to turn around, to take me home, but something about the way her hands clinched the steering wheel, the forward tilt of her head, kept me quiet.

  We took a dirt road off Highway 90, turning inland, and continued on for what seemed like five or so miles, the truck pitching wildly when the tires caught a rut.

  “I’ll be home by three, you say?” I needed to be there before the girls got home. Then I could lie down and tell them I didn’t feel well. That, at least, they were used to.

  The woman took another turn onto a narrower road. “Before three.”

  The sugar maples that overlapped the road were orange and red. It was as if I were being driven through a tunnel of fire. My legs had taken on a life of their own, jumping about like oversized crickets. I felt a burning deep inside, low in my belly. Perhaps it was untangling itself, as eager to be gone as I was to let it go.

  The woman glanced at my lively legs. “It ain’t that bad,” she said.

  She took one last turn onto a dirt drive and through a stand of dark pines. Underneath them, the house, colorless as air, looked like a child’s playhouse. With the window shades pulled all the way down, the filthy panes stared blindly. Taped in one of the front windows: “Chiro Treatments. Pane Free.”

  When I got out of the truck, my legs buckled. The ground felt rubbery.

  The woman came around and took my elbow. “Don’t go wasting folks’ own good time now.” She led me up through the waist-high weeds to the front door and we went in. I was expecting a waiting room, a neatly dressed receptionist behind a desk; but there was only a dark, dusty corridor with closed doors up and down. As we walked down the hall with its peeling wallpaper and filthy linoleum floor, I heard murmurs, then an exclamation of surprise. There was a stink of rancid bacon grease. I began to gag.

  The woman opened the door to the third room on the right. I had imagined an examining table with stirrups but instead there was a regular bed and over it a contraption hanging from the ceiling, a stained piece of canvas with some belts. It looked jerry-rigged and oddly sexual. The unexpectedness of the device, its foreignness, sucked the breath from my chest. I’d left earth for another planet, never to return to the dear familiar. These people would kill me and steal my money. I would be buried out in the woods, under the pine needles, never to be found. Holly and the girls would think I’d just taken off, left them for another kind of life. I turned around, intent on heading out the door, when the woman told me to take off my underwear and lie down. She handed me a frayed sheet to put over my legs and said the doctor would be with me shortly.

  After she left the room, I collapsed on the bed and put my head between my legs to keep from fainting. Should I run? I willed myself to think straight. I thought of real work, work you could see: those Louisiana swamp boats stretching out into the night, landing on the coast of Normandy, saving us all. The girls were growing up, now was my time to build something new. I picked up the sheet. Its ordinariness calmed me.

  The canvas went around my legs and neck. The woman came back and got me situated. She tightened the contraption and it lifted me until I dangled like a fish caught in a net, my legs splayed.

  Then a fat man in a stained white jacket came into the room. He gave me two pills that looked like aspirin, told me to think about something pleasant. So I imagined my future. Soon the girls would be able to take care of themselves. I’d go back and get my degree. Maybe I’d teach biology, spending weeks and weeks on birds. I’d explain lift and thrust—the mechanics of how a bird takes the air. We’d build nest boxes, study exotic species. In the summer, I’d take the girls to Paris, France. At the picture show I’d seen a woman in the French Resistance wearing a beret low over one eye as she ran down one dark street after another, carrying secret documents through the rain. I’d get myself one of those berets. I’d smoke long thin cigarettes from a mother-of-pearl holder.

  The man pried me apart with something that looked like a pair of tongs for canning; then he brought out a rubber tube, impossibly long, and began to insert it. He turned it around and around as he pushed it in, higher and higher up. A grenade of pain gathered deep inside, then exploded. I screamed for him to stop and, finally, he did. Then he produced what appeared to be a bread knife and sawed away the rest of the tube and pushed it up too. He told me to get dressed, go home, and wait. On Sunday, he said, I must pull out the tube. Then, in a few hours, it would all be over. Prepare for bleeding, he said.

  I had thought he would finish it, I thought by now it would be over. I started to cry. I said, “You mean I have to keep this thing inside me until Sunday?” By then he was out the door.

  I bent double when the woman lowered me back down to the bed and took me out of the contraption. I checked my watch. It was 1:30. The woman rummaged around in my sack, came out with the pad and belt, hooked up the pad, and handed them to me along with my underwear.

  On the way home my hips ached and my stomach lurched when we hit the ruts in the road. I bent over and banged my head on the dashboard. I was bleeding and cramping something terrible.

  But there was a lifting too, as if I had suddenly grown feathers. I thought of myself as a hummingbird hatchling. Hummingbird babies are unlike other birds. They don’t hop about on the ground when they leave the nest; they pitch themselves from the edge as if their nest is on fire, and take flight.

  LAST NIGHT, SATURDAY, I floated on air, hovering above myself in the bed. When Holly came in to see about me and saw the blood, I told him what I’d done. He began to cry. “It would have been a boy,” he said. “I could have shown him things. I could have taught him to do things.”

  I told him he had two perfectly good children who followed him around like puppies. He could teach them whatever he wanted.

  “They’re girls,” he said. “It’s not the same.” Then he walked over to me and grabbed both of my arms hard. How he wanted to hit me! “Is it done? What if you went to a real doctor instead of a slimy butcher? Can it be fixed?”

  I fingered the knobs on the bedpost. “You can’t put the rain back in the sky.”

  “Where’d you get the money?”

  “Your secret savings,” I said, “the one you’ve been hiding.”

  He squeezed my arms until I cried out, then dropped them and strode out of the room. I heard him go down into the basement and bring up the cherry bounce and put it on the kitchen counter. I heard him pull the cork. A chill swept through me. I began to shake, then
pour sweat. The bed felt oily. There were rose blossoms on the sheets.

  He brought the jar of cherry bounce into the bedroom and set it on the dresser. He’d already opened it and was carrying a half-empty glass. He downed it, poured another, downed it too. “Would you like to know what that money was for?” His voice had a different tone than I’d ever heard. Soft, with menace behind it, the purr of the cat before it pounces.

  Then he told me about Paris, how he wanted it to be a nice trip with all the extras. “We would have gone in May,” he said, “when everything is in bloom and the cafés set up their tables outside.” He’d wanted to show me the street the French and American battalions had come down after they’d liberated the city and the Parisians had kissed their liberators, men on the cheeks, girls on the lips. The Champs-Élysées. Then he went to the closet and rummaged around and pulled out the beret. It was bright blue, not a color I’d have chosen. “I hope you enjoy wearing it in Opelika,” he said. He threw it to the floor and ground it under his heel.

  He wanted me to cry, he wanted me to say I was sorry. But I couldn’t and I wasn’t.

  WHAT’S DONE IS done. Now, finally, it’s time to finish it. The man said just to give the tube a yank, like it was the cord to the closet light. There’d be cramps, he said, then the expulsion. I’ve been bleeding and cramping more than I’d thought possible, but all that will stop when I get rid of it.

  I will feel my way. I will be a river opening to the sea, inevitable and sure.

  Once, when I was a girl, my mother took me on a Greyhound bus to the ocean. Late that afternoon we stood out on the beach watching the sun go down. A dog ran in and out of the surf, a stick in its mouth. Pelicans skimmed the waves in perfect formation. My mother’s hair blew up against her cheek, a piece snagged on her eyelash. She said, “There’s a whole world out there, Olivia. There are places where people sit at tables in the street and eat and drink all day long. They sit under trees and the blossoms fall in their hair.” She turned to me, her hair now blown back from her face, and I saw she was crying.