JOIN IN A DISCUSSION OF THIS BOOK!
http://www.thereadonwnc.ning.com>
When Day Is Done
Julia Nunnally Duncan
Esther passed Oak Grove Cemetery every weekday as she drove to work and passed it again on the drive home. Her brother’s grave couldn’t be seen from the highway, though she always strained to see it, as now while she was heading to the technical college to teach her five p.m. literature class. Stopped in traffic, this Wednesday evening, she stretched her neck to get a glimpse of the square marble stone. Though she could not see it, she knew the stone well: its rippled top and glass-like surface, still shiny today in 1990—twenty years after the burial—still cool to the touch, even on warm June days, as today.
But at the moment she didn’t have time to pull off the highway to rest against the stone. Often though she would drive up the winding cemetery road that snaked by wrought-iron enclosed family plots and oak-shaded Confederate graves and led farther still to poorer graves marked only by creek rocks. Beyond the poor section, close to the railroad tracks were the newer generations of Milton dead. Here her brother Sandy lay.
Miniature American flags dotted the hills, probably from Flag Day. The local Veterans of Foreign Wars group was conscientious about keeping Milton’s veterans’ graves properly adorned. Not Sandy’s grave, she thought, for he had been too young—seventeen—when he died to have served in Vietnam. Which would have been worse? She knew this was pointless speculation. Death in the long run is death, after all. Degrees of suffering alone distinguished one kind from the other. At least being killed instantly carried the smile of mercy. Or so the preacher had said at the funeral.
One maintenance worker, a yellow-haired man who wore a bandana around his head, sat on a riding lawnmower, and the other worker, whose hair was dark, held a weed eater. The dark-haired man jerked the string of his trimmer and swept his brow with his tanned forearm. His red tee shirt was patched with sweat.
When this second man looked at her and raised his eyebrows as if just noticing her, she looked away from him to the road in front of her and gripped the steering wheel. Finally the cars ahead of her moved and let her lift her foot from the brake. She moved forward and checked her rearview mirror to see him lowering the weed eater to the grassy bank above the highway.
Take care of their graves, she thought, and lost his image.
But later that evening she looked for him when she passed by again at eight o’clock. Dusk had fallen, and of course he wouldn’t be working so late, but she crept in the 35 m.p.h. zone and then headed home.
“Wonder who the maintenance workers are out at Oak Grove?” she asked her mother the next morning while they sat at the kitchen table. Though Esther was thirty-four and had been married and divorced, she lived at home with her parents. Her mother Lyla cooked their meals.
“Maintenance workers?” Lyla said and pushed a jar of apple butter toward her. “Put some of this in a biscuit. I buttered you one.”
Esther took a soggy biscuit, saturated with Shedd Spread, opened it, dabbed a tablespoon of apple butter into it. She took a bite and waited for an answer. “Wonder who they are?” she asked again.
“It ain’t a job many would want,” Lyla said. “You know how it gets hot out there of a day, and they’ve cut down some of the pines that added shade. Why you reckon they cut them down?”
“Keep criminals out, I guess,” she said, referring to an incident of several years back when a Tennessee prison escapee fled to Milton and was spotted at Oak Grove. He hid in the pines and was later shot to death in a cotton mill house nearby.
“Why is it hoodlums come to cemeteries?” Lyla asked, her blue eyes set in a baby doll stare. “Why can’t they leave the dead in peace?”
Esther looked at her mother’s lined face, the prettiness of her features twisted in the question.
“That’s why they need a caretaker,” she said and waited for the shadow of her mother’s mood to pass.
“What would draw a man to work at the cemetery?” Lyla said finally. “You know it don’t pay much.”
“Neither does the cotton mill,” she said. “Of course the mill benefits are better—if you don’t count brown lung.”
“Don’t let Arthur hear you say that,” Lyla said and glanced across the room toward the kitchen’s arched entrance. Down the hallway was her parents’ bedroom, not really within earshot of the kitchen, yet Esther knew her mother feared their conversation might be heard by her daddy. No need to worry, though, as her daddy hadn’t risen from bed yet. He usually slept till ten o’clock or later since his retirement.
“You know it’s true,” she said.
“He does too,” Lyla said, “but there’s no use in bringing it up. This house was paid for by cotton mill sweat. There’s pride in that.”
“He earned every cent,” Esther said. She didn’t know why she brought up the brown lung issue. Her daddy had a cough and his hearing wasn’t perfect, though she suspected he just didn’t want to hear at times, but he had escaped the fate of his brother Dave who died of emphysema before he retired. Her daddy defended the mill and said lung problems ran in the family even before the 1920’s when his mother’s brothers died of T.B.
Still, she knew his work in the mill had scarred him and retirement had made a fresh wound. Fixing machines was his skill, acquired and perfected over forty years, and without the mill, he seemed lost.
So she dropped the subject of brown lung.
Lyla pulled the plates from the table and wiped the vinyl tablecloth with a wet dishrag.
“Let me help, Mother,” Esther said, but Lyla didn’t stop her movements or look at her, and when she started to put the jar of apple butter in the refrigerator, her mother said, “Leave that out for Arthur,” though they both knew he wouldn’t eat a bite until suppertime.
“You can cover the biscuits with tin foil,” Lyla said and she obeyed, also knowing the birds wouldn’t care whether they were soft or hard.
She left at ten-thirty for her eleven o’clock class. Her mother was hoeing her garden in the back yard; her daddy had turned on the T.V. in the front room and sat on the couch watching it.
“I’ll see you after while, Daddy,” she said and her daddy nodded though he kept his eyes on the screen. He would be sitting there when she returned.
As she drove through town she passed the Episcopal church where she and Richard had married in 1980; also here on Main Street was Porter’s Law Office where the divorce papers were finalized three years later. She wondered if Richard still served on the vestry at St. James and wondered if he played tennis every Friday evening as he had during the brief span of their marriage. Did he still work for his father’s insurance agency? Of course he would be employed there. By now he was bound to be a full partner.
She had heard that Richard had remarried and had a daughter. This is what he wanted all along.
She could see his long dark-blond hair as it was when they started dating in the mid- 70’s. He wore wire-rimmed eyeglasses that gave him a scholarly look and was one of the first young men she had ever seen wearing an earring. At Appalachian State University, where they both attended college and where they began dating, he joined a fraternity that his father didn’t approve of and devoured Chinese philosophy. He turned to her for approval, and she listened to him, though she still secretly preferred the philosophy of Rod McKuen.
Her mother never completely accepted Richard.
“Baptists should marry Baptists,” Lyla said after the Episcopal wedding.
“There ain’t any spirit in this church. You don’t get the spirit by reading everything out of a book.” She meant the Book of Common Prayer that the Episcopalians used in their service.
Later Esther felt the same lack of spirit in Richard. Maybe her mother was right. Though she herself hadn’t attended a Baptist church service in years, she recalled the revival services of her childhood, the preacher’s face filled with blood, the vein in his temple bulging.
She couldn’t imagine Richard’s family approving such religious fervor. And though Richard might have rebelled against his parents in college, he came back to the fold soon enough. When she and he finished graduate school and married, he cut his hair, discarded his earring, and left his unorthodox views in Boone. His father welcomed him back and she released him. A child was the goal of his desire, and when that wasn’t achieved, his desire died. So she was glad he had a daughter now.
It’s funny how she’d lived in the same town as Richard for seven years since the divorce and hadn’t seen him once.
She hadn’t seen Martin, the boy she considered her first love, but twice in nineteen years, and that was only from a distance. She knew if she saw Martin again, stood close to him, touched his hand, she couldn’t let him go. And yet she hadn’t spoken a word to him since she was fifteen. But with Martin, time hadn’t passed. God help her, she knew it was true.
She shut her eyes now and made Martin fade as she had many times before.
Milton was growing, and new people moved here every day. So many new faces. Though why people came here was a mystery to Esther. One furniture factory had shut down, a piano plant relocated, the small family-run hosiery mills were closing one by one, and no new industries were moving in. Yet people came to the foothills—drawn by the Blue Ridge Mountains—bought land and developed it. The downtown stores were moving to shopping centers—Walmart and Roses Plazas—farmhouses leveled, cornfields dug up and paved. When she thought about the changes in Milton—how unfamiliar the town must suddenly seem to the older citizens—she decided her daddy was right in abandoning himself to T.V. He watched Wheel of Fortune, first on one channel and then another, and it made sense.
And all these thoughts because she passed by St. James’ church and recalled Richard. He wasn’t worth it.
While she drove beyond Main Street and drew closer to Oak Grove Cemetery, she wondered if the dark-haired maintenance worker would be there. She checked her watch and saw that she had time to drive through the cemetery.
It won’t take long, she thought. Even if I’m tardy my students will wait. Lately her enthusiasm for teaching had waned, though she couldn’t afford to lose her job. Her parents’ social security checks wouldn’t support three people. As it was, with her salary she bought the groceries, kept the house painted and repaired, and saw that her daddy had a nice Zenith television set. Without children of her own to support and build a bank account for, she focused her spending and attention on her parents. Someone once asked her what she would do someday when her parents weren’t in that house with her. She made the idea fade just as she had Martin’s face.
She spent some money on herself too. Last summer she financed a new Honda Civic. Her daddy’s old Buick sat parked in a garage beside the house, rarely driven, its battery weak from disuse. Her mother had stopped driving years ago.
“What would you do without me?” she’d asked her mother one Sunday as they sat at the dinner table. Lyla turned her blue eyes on her as she held a bowl of creamed corn in her hands.
“Dip you out some corn here,” Lyla said, ignoring the question. “It’s some I raised last year,” and Esther felt embarrassed for asking the question.
Now she pulled into the cemetery drive, slowly climbed the first hill, and took the right fork. The sun was already bright—thank goodness for the car’s air conditioner. She would have to get air conditioning installed at home, too, before the summer was over. Here it was the first day of summer—June 21—and already in the 90’s.
At the crest of a second hill she turned left and reached a section of older graves that were marked by flat granite slabs. Some were broken and others chipped by vandals—as revealed in a recent newspaper article. She also noticed that few graves in the entire cemetery were decorated by flowers. Weren’t there dozens of wreaths here on Memorial Day? That was less than a month ago. Maybe the families had come to remove them. Or maybe the maintenance workers had cleaned the graves.
Today there were also fewer miniature flags on the veterans’ graves.
As she took a U-turn and started down the hill past a row of mimosa trees at a group of World War I graves, she saw him. His dark naked back was turned to her. He leaned into a tangle of vines at the base of a fence-lined family plot. She looked away at first, not aware she’d stopped her car. But her eyes turned to him again. He moved the weedeater slowly from side to side, swaying slightly himself. Despite his strong build, the muscles in his shoulders and arms taut with the weight of the machine, he looked graceful. She watched him.
He must lift weights or something, she decided. Maybe he went to an exercise gym. This idea repulsed her. She didn’t like the type of man who went to health clubs to meet women.
But she couldn’t help watching him.
Before he turned to look at her, she forced her eyes from him and took her foot off the brake.
Stupid, she thought, to come here. And she headed down the winding hills.
Nearing the front entrance, she saw the yellow-haired man leaning against a brick gatepost. When she passed through the entranceway, she glanced at him, and he winked. She quickly pulled into the highway. She couldn’t believe it. Men from her childhood winked at women. Did men still flirt that way?
I hope he forgets my face, she thought.
On her drive to the college, she realized she hadn’t even thought about Sandy’s grave.
isbn 1-59661-114-6
230 pages/$15
JOIN IN A DISCUSSION OF THIS BOOK!
http://www.thereadonwnc.ning.com>
Julia Nunnally Duncan tells a love story of steadfast hearts. But When Day Is Done is also a story of an intense struggle for personal freedom. Resonant with details of Appalachian life, letter-perfect in its laconic dialogue, suspenseful in its revelation of family secrets, this novel, as fresh and steady as a whitewashed picket fence, will stand in its readers’ memories for a very long time indeed. A real treasure!
—Fred Chappell
We read novels to gain access to the secret hearts of others. Under the spell of Duncan’s calm, cool, precise prose, we’re drawn into the surprising life of an ordinary woman who, like the rest of us, is trying to forge a future without destroying the past. When Day is Done is a captivating and original love story.
—Lewis Buzbee
Julia Nunnally Duncan studied creative writing at Warren Wilson College and is the author of three books of fiction.
JOIN IN A DISCUSSION OF THIS BOOK!
http://www.thereadonwnc.ning.com>