by Kat Meads
No one was entirely sure. The townsfolk had suspicions, yes. There had been speculation and rumors aplenty. There had been disagreements and flat-out arguments on the subject among men, among women, among men and women, among children and their elders. As for the unassailable truth, the indisputable fact that passes as truth -- that kind of plausible, comforting certainty simply couldn't be arrived at with regards to the whereabouts of the Leonards. Too many people had too many opinions.
The grocer said they still had an account.
The dry cleaner said Mr. Leonard's pinstriped summer suit, brought in by Mrs. Leonard in March, was cleaned and pressed and bagged and ready for pick-up but hadn't yet been.
The county tax collector swore their bill was paid in full.
Whenever asked, the girl Sean Leonard jilted after football season tried to tell her side of the misunderstanding but seldom could, overcome by fresh tears.
Every night for a week, the nearest neighbor glimpsed a light shining in the attic and recognized the bark of the Leonards' old cur, but allowed that many a hungry stray cruised barnyards, sniffing after chickens, so maybe it wasn't the Leonards' cur after all that constantly howled at the moon.
The hairdresser said she hadn't seen much of Mrs. Leonard since Mrs. Leonard quit dying her hair and decided to wear it in some straggly, haphazard, wagon-train-mistress-style bun.
The rural-route mailman said he'd never delivered directly to the house and wasn't about to start now, just because folks were curious, but somebody definitely was emptying the mail box at the end of the Leonards' dirt road, mail and flyers, daily.
The mechanic who serviced Mr. Leonard's truck when it started running ragged said he'd have to check his records but near as he could recall he'd changed the oil and filter on that Chevy within the last two months for sure.
The choir director, who happened to overhear the youngest Leonard child singing to herself in the church parking lot, hadn't by any means given up her campaign to enlist that heavenly voice in the Lord's work and admitted to dropping by unannounced on several occasions to promote that very goal, in the process never once finding the Leonards' house other than spotless, and although she agreed the bun did nothing to improve Mrs. Leonard's looks, probably that style was a convenience for a woman who cleaned house as often as Mrs. Leonard so obviously did.
The bank clerk insisted there'd been no unusual activity in the Leonards' co-signed account, although customer information was confidential and not for public consumption.
The GP who urged Mr. Leonard to make an appointment over at City General to have the two skin cancers on his neck removed couldn't say for certain whether the patient followed his advice, but at the time of its giving, Mr. Leonard had nodded courteously and thanked the doctor twice for the suggestion.
The lawyer who was handling the nuisance suit brought against the Leonards by the McCaffertys for fouling their ditches with pig sewage said the case was proceeding along "the usual channels," but wasn't scheduled to be adjudicated for another six months at the earliest.
The sheriff admitted that he had picked up a vagrant on the outskirts of town, not too far from the Leonards' farm, walking square in the middle of the road, refusing to move aside even with a car horn blaring at him and that same vagrant claimed he knew the Leonards and referred to them as quote a clannish breed originally from the mountains unquote, but the sheriff couldn't put much stock in that comment since at the time the man was in a highly intoxicated state and on further questioning called the Leonards the Lombards, and then, with greater vehemence, the Brumseys.
The school principal said it was his understanding that the Leonards had, against his counsel, taken their children for a tour of the salt flats of Utah, and upon return each of the Leonard children would be required to submit a detailed report about their travels to make up for all the school work they'd missed.
The principal's private secretary, however, told several of her closest friends in strictest confidence that she'd seen Sean Leonard smoking behind the gym on Wednesday last, no vacation notes had been filed by the Leonard parents, and, further, that it was the principal who corresponded faithfully with Utah's Department of Tourism, witness the pile of brochures stuffed in his top desk drawer and bearing his personal address.
A woman who claimed to be a distant cousin of Mrs. Leonard did, eventually, pick up Mr. Leonard's suit at the dry cleaners, according to another regular customer who happened to be picking up two of her husband's starched shirts at the time.
Sean Leonard's best friend, Alfred Carmichael, a boy who had never in his young life been caught in a lie, gave his solemn word that his friend considered tobacco a filthy, disgusting weed and believed anyone who smoked should be whipped with a leather belt, as did Sean himself.
The Leonards' part-time farm hand, Amos, said the family had never owned a dog, mongrel or pure breed, just cats and a relatively tame pair of foxes.
The owner of the local gas station at the crossroads between Pike Road and the launch, whom everyone agreed price-gouged his customers, taking unfair advantage of their isolation and distance from town, confessed to extending credit, against his better judgment, to old man Leonard the last time he stopped in for a fill-up because Leonard unexpectedly found himself $3.00 short of the necessary cash and offered to sign an IOU and repay the debt the very next morning, which had been a good month ago if a day and just went to prove no businessman could trust the word of any man, no matter how honest his reputation.
A sober vagrant who managed to elude the patrolling sheriff confirmed he'd seen a light coming from the Leonards' place, but said the beam was far too bright for an attic bulb and clearly came from the mother ship.
The minister said anyone who sang for the Lord must do so willingly, uncoerced, with a "generous and open and God-fearing heart."
The GP said that many folks who spent their lives in the sun developed skin cancers and although skin cancer wasn't a serious, life-threatening condition, men of a certain age should exercise caution and have medical checkups regularly.
The hairdresser said it really was a shame when a woman with any looks to begin with let herself go, and she would think and say the very same even if beautifying the populace wasn't her chosen profession.
The mailman said that if someone put a knife to his throat and forced him to estimate, he'd guess the Leonards did, on average, receive less mail than most of the community.
The principal's secretary insisted with some heat that every trusted employee had access to the boss's desk and if she'd known in advance that people were going to make snide remarks and impugn her character and get in her business, she'd have kept her original information to herself.
The sheriff said he was the one who called the pound, had to, because those Leonard animals were running wild, bothering folks, making a terrible racket, plus starving to death.
The farm hand Amos said the Leonards' cats were fat as mullets and friendly too until the sheriff started coming round every few days firing off a round of ammunition whenever he turned a corner and that Alfred Carmichael and a girl who looked like Sean's girlfriend had better watch themselves, picnicking out under the pecan trees with an armed and jumpy sheriff prowling the place too.
The grocer said he reckoned a family of four could, if circumstances demanded, live off three bags of groceries for three weeks if they planned ahead and took care to eat sparingly and had already laid in a stock of staples like butter, flour and corn meal.
The county tax collector said he wasn't prepared to discuss what action, if any, the county would take should the Leonards, or someone representing their interests, fail to pay the next tax installment when it came due nor would he speculate how much the Leonards' acres might bring in the event of a distress sale.
In a note taped to the post office door, in block letters, an anonymous someone declared himself or herself sick to death of all the idle gossip about the Leonards, which the devil plainly had a hand in.
When the post mistress came to work and tore that message down, she told the three waiting to buy stamps that the devil had better things to do than care about the wagging tongues of Camden, but the choir director, one of those direly in need of postage, was frankly stunned that a woman known for her sporadic church attendance would stand in front of a federal facility and second guess the devil's priorities, or the Lord's....
© 2000-20001 Kat Meads
This story appears in Kat Meads' chapbook Stress in America, published by March Street Press. Her chapbook of prose poems, Quizzing the Dead, is now available from Pudding House Publications. Other books by Kat Meads include: fiction: Wayward Women and Not Waving; poetry: Filming the Everyday, The Queendom, and Night Bones; literary essays: Born Southern and Restless. Among her honors, she was a Bread Loaf Fellow nominee in 2000. Her plays have been seen on both coasts and Lawrence, Kansas as well.
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