The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [201]
Pregnant at the time with Sam, Grandee soon began—as the town put it—“acting up.” But of course, they understood why, after so terrible a loss. She went out alone at night, driving recklessly on winding country roads, while her husband sat waiting for her on the porch. The town thought she was hoping to die but was unable deliberately to drive off the road because of the baby she carried, the girl she would name Samantha Anne.
Once Grandee didn’t come home till dawn and that time the judge, who’d never been known to lose his composure, slapped her. He hadn’t done it before and he never did it again. He was a large, thickly built man and Grandee was small-boned and slender, but her leap at his face knocked him to the floor and her bite mark on his hand didn’t heal for a month.
A year later she tried to pour a pan of boiling water on his face, but only scarred his ear.
Sam knew from an early age that her parents were very unhappy together and that nothing she did made them feel any less so. Jack learned the same lesson. Grandee gave her second son the name she’d given his dead older brother. The name but not the love. Framed baby pictures of the dead Johnny crowded the lid of the grand piano. Johnny’s baby clothes crowded the drawers of the dresser inside the closet of Jack’s room.
By the time Sam reached junior high school, Grandee had briefly gone twice to a hospital for “nervous disorders.” When she scratched an orderly the first time, they strapped her to her bed. When she started pulling out her hair the second time, they gave her sedatives. The pills helped her through the rest of her life.
By the time Jack was a teenager, the town no longer talked much about the fact that Grandee was “troubled.” They had their own troubles, almost everybody did. Those were times when half the country couldn’t get along with the other half. Jack fought more and more violently with his parents, especially after “the Ruthie episode.” Sam tried to repair the rifts. “Why do you care, Sam?” her younger brother would yell at her. “Stop caring. Why do you love them? They never loved you or me or each other. To hell with them.”
But Sam thought there must have been love. She was always searching for photos of her mother and her father to prove it. Photos from some unknown time when they had loved each other. She always believed Jack was wrong, that at least far in the past her parents had been deeply in love. One day in her early teens, she’d been seized with the idea that her parents’ happy pictures were hidden away somewhere, maybe inside her mother’s “sitting room” on the top floor, the door of which was kept locked. Sam found the key to this hidden room and opened the door.
She was horrified by what she saw. Every piece of cloth in the room was sewn together with red yarn. A white window curtain was stitched to a blue bedspread. The spread stretched down to a throw rug on the floor and was sewn to it. A silk slip and a bath towel hung together from a curtain that was sewn to a pillow. Everything was sewn tightly, senselessly together with the blood red yarn, like sutures in some awful botched surgery. Unable to breathe, Sam shut the door behind her. She sat on the stairs and finally she wept at the evidence of her mother’s madness until she was wrung dry of tears. The twelve-year-old Jack found her, her head pressed to the stair rail and he tried to make her laugh by doing a crazy dance for her.
Clark told Annie a version of one family story that was incomplete, but he wasn’t to learn that until a few years later.
He told her this much: On Sam’s last Thanksgiving vacation from college she came home early. It had been a hard time for her. Her first love affair had ended with the woman’s calling it quits. Jack and his parents hadn’t spoken since the Ruthie episode. Ruthie had