The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [21]
Annie certainly had no desire to drive around town with Mrs. Nickerson on her college breaks, hearing about dead Peregrines, but because she loved Georgette (and was vaguely interested in the family history), she kept going.
They saw the boardinghouse where Peregrine females were “taken in like laundry” during “the War of the Confederacy.”
They traced the footings of the Aquene River landing where Boss Peregrine’s grandfather burnt to a crisp in a steamboat explosion.
They walked through the courthouse lobby where Boss’s father was driven so mad by his son’s death at Gettysburg that he shot two Yankees occupying the town and got himself hanged.
They located the exact spot on River Street where Boss, stabbed in the back of the neck, “dropped down dead as a dead dog,” in front of his own bank, and the spot in St. Mark’s cemetery where his Negro mistress leaped into his grave—to the mortification of his widow.
Georgette’s mother lured “the girls” with dainty pimento cheese sandwiches to listen to her tell them how Jack and Sam’s father, the judge, “lost it all due to alcohol, down to his self-respect and lower than that.” How Grandee, Sam and Jack’s mother, had gone so crazy that the sheriff was forced to subdue her on Main Street in her bare feet, because she was breaking store windows with a hammer and then dancing on the bloody glass.
Over deviled eggs, Kim told them how Jack remained a bad influence on George until Kim straightened him out and married him and gave birth to Georgette.
She told them how Jack was jilted by George’s sister Ruthie and left town.
How Sam started kissing a woman in public and then openly lived with her till the woman ran off.
How the judge drove off River Road at a high curve “on a fateful night” and drowned in his car in the fast Aquene rapids below, his body not recovered for weeks, and how Grandee was unable to grasp the fact that he was dead and kept asking for years where her husband was.
Kim said she knew the whole story: Sam had called the police at midnight to say that the judge was missing. Emerald police had gone looking and found his tire marks in the muddy ruts of River Road, gouged over the side. It took them three weeks to dredge the car from the water below and by then the judge’s body was “no more recognizable than the side of a cow in a meat locker.”
Some people said it was odd that Judge Peregrine had driven off to Raleigh in the worst rainstorm in a decade; they started rumors of suicide but the rumors didn’t go anywhere. Judge Peregrine’s funeral service at St. Mark’s was the biggest that Emerald had enjoyed since the funeral of his grandfather, the Boss.
The funeral was when Annie’s father had robbed his dead father, stolen his sister’s car, and left town for good. “I was the one who saw him go,” Kim boasted. “‘He’s got your car!’ I yelled at Sam. But would she do a thing about it?”
The answer was presumably no.
After the reception, Jack and Sam’s mother retired to her bedroom, locked the door behind her, and stayed there for a year, overcome, the town assumed, by grief. Sam told the cleaning lady, who “did the house” once a week, that she was never to bother Grandee, that Sam would clean her room herself. But the cleaning lady later told Kim that she’d once seen the judge’s widow crouched on her brass bed, eating a live mouse, her lips smeared shining red. Grandee would still be loose in Emerald, a certifiable madwoman, if she hadn’t stabbed Sam with scissors and the sheriff hadn’t talked Sam into signing her mother into a home.
In fact, said Kim, not to mince words, over the centuries the whole Peregrine family had gone bat-shit crazy.
Annie had no reason to doubt the truth of these sad stories; she knew far less about