Against the Ruins Read online

  Against

  the Ruins

  Linda Lightsey Rice

  iUniverse, Inc.

  Bloomington

  Against the Ruins

  Copyright © 2012 by Linda Lightsey Rice

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  The author wishes to thank the St. Mar Arts Group for the generous gift that helped fund the publication of this book.

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  Cover Photo © Linda Lightsey Rice

  ISBN: 978-1-4759-1737-6 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-4759-1739-0 (hc)

  ISBN: 978-1-4759-1738-3 (e)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012907565

  Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  Rice, Linda Lightsey

  Against the ruins: a novel / Linda Lightsey Rice.—1st ed.

  iUniverse rev. date: 7/20/2012

  In memory of my mother

  Frances Lightsey Rice

  Oh Lord, prop me up in all my leaning places.

  —African American prayer, circa 1937,

  from Home By The River by Archibald Rutledge

  Contents

  Lyra's Prologue , 2004

  Part I: Lyra , 2004

  Part II: Louise , 1957

  Part III: Lyra , 2004

  Part IV: Louise , 1957

  Part V: Lyra , 2004

  Part VI: Louise , 1957

  Part VII: Lyra and Louise , 2004

  Lyra's Epilogue , 2006

  Acknowledgments

  The action takes place in Columbia, South Carolina.

  Liberties have been taken with various historical places and events.

  Lyra's Prologue

  2004

  I grew up between a cemetery and a madhouse. I played in ancestral Civil War ruins. Our family car was a yellow Checker taxicab, my best friend’s mother a prostitute. A neighbor believed she’d trapped her husband’s soul in a green glass jar and our house sat atop a potter’s field. My childhood was leafy oak trees, craziness, and ghosts.

  This was the South Carolina I knew. That upstart state, rabble-rousing bunch, swept-yard poor and Cadillac-rich all hot and sticky together and plumb overrun with crimson flowers, slow afternoon syllables hanging in the soft scented air like fluttering wing-weary butterflies. Cape jasmine, gardenia, magnolia, mimosa—even the words droop heavy with scent. So much color and so much sunlight so tormented by the old gray memory. This is the tattoo on my psyche, inked deep, lasting beyond death.

  Troubled history, scars both public and private, everywhere you look.

  My family’s past is like the place we come from, a mirrored hall of memory, mythology, mirage. Dizzying images appear and recede, combine and separate. The real picture is as wavy as old glass. That rippled reality began the December I was six, when afterward everyone acted as though none of it had happened. A penchant for sorcery travels true in our veins. But I know what happened, a few bits and pieces anyway, even if I don’t know what—in the long run—these fragments mean.

  I can’t see the scar, but I know it’s there.

  Part I: Lyra

  2004

  Chapter One

  In the air, I remember a day in Uta’s house. I’d only been in her house a few times: I was leery of the imposing granite mansion with its two-foot-thick walls, its turret, even a carriage ramp. A low stone fence ran alongside her sidewalk, a rusty iron gate—the cemetery kind—admitting visitors into the yard. Not that many came to call. The whole place felt like a perfect spot for the undead to hang out. And Uta herself—always in dark rustling clothes like you’d imagine in a Brontë novel, white ringlets, one sleeve pinned back where her left arm should have been. I had yet to discover that she could make flowers grow just by whistling at them.

  Ours was a weary street of leaning, lazy clapboards, old wood houses that breathed and shifted and whined in the wind, making Uta’s imperious dark castle mysterious, a fortification not to be messed with. Everything in her house was fusty, old-fashioned, spooky. The air felt filmy with dust motes, the hallway smelled like lavender sachets people were always giving old ladies, and in the “parlor” a double-globe lamp with roses painted on the glass sat beside a high-back velvet sofa obviously stuffed with lead. That day, though, my mother and I were in the less formal “sitting room” (in my house we sat in all the rooms) when Uta put a raw egg on a dish and said we needed to hear the Legend of the Egg. I figured on a tale about how baby chickens poked their way through the shell. Maybe Uta’d make those baby chicks fly or change color or do something interesting.

  “This story is from the Ashanti people,” she said, lowering her voice as though speaking of secrets or sacraments, “but they got it from the ancient Egyptians. I heard it from an African man down to Charleston. He was a magic man—why, he could make a woman pregnant just by touching her stomach. Women would go to see him, never tell their husbands. He was seven feet tall, always wore a purple turban. All he had to do was walk down the street in Charleston and all the white people got the jitters.”

  Uta asked my mother to pick up the egg. When my mother grasped it by one end, Uta made a fuss, said she’d drop it that way. My mother curled her whole hand around it but got scolded again. I was hoping Uta would make the egg disappear up the sleeve of her good arm.

  “The egg is the symbol of life,” she said, looking at my mother but nodding toward me. “Your egg made this amazing child, did it not?”

  She reached for the egg and balanced it on her upturned palm. “Like this, not too tight, not too loose. Or life will be destroyed.”

  Apparently no baby chicks were going to do anything. I began wishing somebody would just cook the thing.

  It’s clear that nobody in my clan ever really got it.

  I cried almost the entire flight, soared over the Rocky Mountains in an emotional and uncharacteristically public free-for-all. The pinstriped, lizard-skin-booted Texan sitting next to me was so uncomfortable he went to the bathroom three times. When he noticed I was holding a biography of Lucrezia Borgia, he ordered a double Scotch and didn’t stop drinking until we landed. This is a story my mother would like, except for how enthusiastically I joined the freaked-out Texan in swilling Scottish single malt.

  The stroke has left her unable to speak or open her eyes. I lean over her hospital bed and run my fingers through her thick white hair—I sense that she’s still here yet somewhere else too. Actually, that’s always been the case. I picture her deep-set blue-gray eyes, eyes of rueful sadness, and recall a black-and-white photograph f
rom her twenties—her eyes when young, with their well of amazement, their dazzled joy.

  If I ever saw that joy, I don’t remember it.

  The ventilator hisses, she moves her head slightly.

  Gently I take her swollen hand and whisper, “I’m here.”

  I could swear to God—an expression she’d disapprove of—that she’s talking to herself, or thinking hard, or something. I brush back new tears. I can’t bear the thought of her death, yet for years I’ve not been able to bear the thought of her life either.

  Suddenly I drop her hand and pace across the room, stare at the wall. She didn’t speak or open her eyes when she could have. Did she?

  I whirl back around. Why the hell didn’t you do something?

  When I arrived at the hospital, my father sidestepped our wooden ritual embrace. “I’ve got a contagious disease,” he announced, backing away. He’s been dying of something or other for forty years. He once told me he had lung cancer, but he didn’t seem to need a doctor for it.

  He does not look me in the eye—he never does—nor ask how I am. At eighty-one, he seems a decade younger, still a tall and slender figure with thick silver-blond hair. Healthy, mentally sharp, handsome even. Although he keeps his lovely hair too short to do it justice, his slightly dashing mustache always startles me, especially since it’s wedded to a timid voice and demeanor. Timid with everyone but family, that is. He can remind me, down to the subject and letter, how bad my grades were my freshman year in college, before I discovered there were classes one might do well to attend. He can still name which of my high-school boyfriends were “dumber than toads.” Apparently they all were. Of course, my father also believes that a telephone solicitor, without his permission, can charge a new Buick to his Visa account. Never mind that he wouldn’t give his account number to the Holy Ghost.

  Updating me on my mother’s condition, he steps closer to me than feels comfortable. “I haven’t had a day to myself in four years for taking care of your mother,” he says. Then he stops, as though suddenly realizing who I am. “You gain some weight? Better watch out, you’ll end up as fat as your mother was way back.”

  Welcome home.

  For days now, he and I have watched machines pump life in and out of my mother’s tired body, but we exchange only as many words as necessary. Every night he sleeps in the armchair beside my mother’s bed but he does not speak to her, nor touch his wife of fifty-seven years. When he’s out of the room, I chatter to her about anything and everything. I sound like a robot on speed. Sometimes I offer up a silent prayer that she’s not in pain. She’s never complained about the considerable difficulties of her old age. I, on the other hand, probably came down the birth canal pointing out that there wasn’t enough room.

  I stare at my father across the room. His large, artistic hands are spreadeagled across his khaki-clad knees—he favors informal military dress, a starched white shirt and pressed khakis, as though he has to report to Fort Jackson at any minute. He still wears his gold military academy class ring, its surface worn smooth now. He stretches his fingers nervously. Those are my long fingers too. Piano fingers. As a child, did I ever hold mine against his to compare the length? What would it be like to have a father who’d reach for my hand today?

  While my father keeps overnight vigil at the hospital, I retire to my parents’ suburban rancher in West Columbia, where I lived only a few years before leaving home. Pulling the rental car into the driveway, I wonder—did they move here to get away from the Lincoln Street neighbors who pointed at us for years? This bland, rectangular brick box, flimsy detritus of the 1950s, sits at the dead end of a busy road: a car running the stop sign could leap right into the living room. It still amazes me that my father chose this location. He did plant a row of pine trees along the front property line, his barrier against wayward cars, and the world. I sit staring at the house for a moment, waiting for the familiar knot in my stomach. In the past I often had to force myself to go inside. Would it be okay this time or gut-wrenching awful?

  I spent countless lonely nights here wanting to break dishes, sometimes doing so. I walk toward the carport, stop beside oddly pruned azaleas outlined by heavy three-cornered bricks from the columns of a house burned to the ground in 1865. On the carport, eight small fire extinguishers are lined up like ladder rungs on a moth-eaten wool blanket. This is new. Has he joined the fire department? I pass the padlocked white freezer—who steals frozen chicken around here?—and unlock the side door and go inside. I almost knock over the homemade sawhorse my father uses to barricade the door at night—apparently the two dead bolts will not suffice.

  The bright blue tablecloth I gave my mother one Christmas is still on the oak breakfast table. I close my eyes—I can feel her here. I lean against the wall and remember her voice when I was a child. “You’re special, sweetheart,” she whispers to me. “You can do anything.”

  Except find peace or stay in one place or with one person.

  I breathe in again. Houses, homes, their aroma comes from the woman who lives there, the woman whose sweat seeps into the woodwork and drapes. This smell is my maternal grandparents’ house in Brantley too, their musty furniture overlaid with my mother’s Estée Lauder perfume and Avon body lotion (where did she still get that?) and the deep female scent of her aging. In the knotty-pine paneled den, I sit on the plaid sofa and stare at the painting across from me. My maternal grandmother completed forty paintings before dying at age thirty in the Spanish flu epidemic. This one, four feet by five, is a raging forest fire—Indian red, burnt sienna, brown madder palette. Did oil paints have those names in 1919? Several trees are falling over, a massive plume of gray smoke behind them—yellow ocher and ivory black is my guess, maybe some Payne’s gray. A very dark painting, smoky tonality, acceptance of destruction, no pity.

  My mother’s favorite of her mother’s paintings is this scene of loss. True to the English landscape tradition, all my grandmother’s pictures are dark and moody; she died too early to discover modernism’s bright colors. Suddenly I get up and do the irresponsible—run a forefinger across the texture of hundred-year-old paint, wondering over the relative I know almost nothing about but nonetheless feel connected to. I come away with the mute dust of the past on my fingertip.

  I call and leave a message for the dean of the small Denver college where I teach. I phone several friends, eat my Chinese take-out and watch television mindlessly for an hour, then lie down in my mother’s room, which was once my room. Facing me is my Mother’s Day gift at age twelve, my inept portrait of my mother’s childhood home. That same Mother’s Day she gave me a heartfelt letter telling me how much she’d always wanted a child and thanking me for being so mature that she could depend on me to take care of myself. The letter also contained instructions for my education should something “happen” to her. Even then, I knew that my father lived on another planet and my mother was in a state of retreat. All because of a December over forty years ago? Why couldn’t they recover?

  I decide to shower but can’t abide the threadbare towels in the bathroom—a Depression teenager, my mother still kept “company towels” in a cedar chest. We spent a lot of time preparing an appearance for the company that rarely came after my father installed security cameras on the carport—a burglar could start a film career here. I rummage through the cedar chest. The company towels, which smell wonderful, look a decade old. What are we saving them for? As I plunder, I’m also hoping—I admit it—to find letters or other clues to my mother’s psyche. Louise Copeland has left no opportunity for scavenging her inner life. I admire this. I’m also disappointed. I’d like to know what she’s most hidden from me—who she really is.

  Underneath the towels is a box stuffed with newspaper clippings: reviews of my first gallery show and of others that followed, interviews, an article in a national arts magazine that included me. Photos of my paintings with information about who bought them. My
mother’s archives of my work are better than mine. Which surprises me given that she once suggested I be “practical” and become a dental hygienist. At the time I wondered if her message “You can do anything” only meant anything safe. Absently I smooth out a crease in a newspaper photo of a younger me. Fiery eyes. Eyes determined to rip through the shroud of despair tenting my childhood by becoming someone. I’d escape. Cheat fate. The clippings are brittle and yellowed now. A decade ago my Bonnard-influenced palette went black and muddy, Goya meeting El Greco on a bad day. My cooler abstracts looked confused, and the museum curator who mentored and sustained my career abruptly dropped dead. I began painting portraits in which human skin looked shredded; even my friends thought I was on drugs. Eventually I became too restless—or something—to paint at all.

  After my shower, seeing it’s not locked as usual, I peek inside my father’s bedroom. On every surface papers and files are stacked halfway to the ceiling. He has bank statements from 1955, maybe even earlier. A small television, circa 1982. Old transistor radios and brass lamps waiting to be fixed, a metal detector no doubt bought at a yard sale. A Goodwill store has been taking root in here for decades. Two windows are still sealed with clear plastic to keep out the post 9/11 poison gas that’s going to be shot into South Carolina. On one wall hangs his World War II Bronze Star certificate in a rickety, scratched frame, his metal dog tags slung over it. He never mentioned his wartime service until he was sixty-four, and then out of the blue he dusted off his uniform and joined a veteran’s group. The Air Medal awarded his younger brother, a pilot who died over the Mediterranean the day before the war ended, also hangs on the wall. His is the only photo in the room. I’m the pacifist descendant of warriors: both my great-grandfathers served in the Confederate army, my grandfather fought in Mexico at age sixteen, my mother’s brother drowned himself in alcohol upon returning from North Africa. But my father’s history has particularly haunted my family, the twenty-year-old slogging through the cold sea toward Omaha Beach, jumping off a life raft into history.