LILLIAN'S NIGHTINGALES
By Edward C. Lynskey
 

Out on the macadam road, a car had turned into Lillian’s rutty lane and was approaching.  Peering out, she watched the Postmaster’s Ford swerve over the tiger lilies and park by the paling fence.  When he knocked, she barked at him not to let in the horseflies.  Once standing inside the dim kitchen, his eyes blinked at her.

 “Lo, Mr. Mayhew,” said Lillian.

 “Them sisters of yours sent a letter certified.  I saw Bert in town so I trotted it out.”  His inflections were reedy, halting, and, to a point, friendly.  Doffing his porkpie straw hat, he plucked out an envelope, then dropped it.

 “Do you handle all mail that way?”  Snatching the envelope from him, stashing it up under the front of her blouse, Lillian waited expectantly.

 “Guess I’ll be going then,” Mr. Mayhew finally murmured.  Dejected, he took his leave.  

 Lillian unfolded the prim stationary and studied the crooked font, each line trailing down the sheet:
 
 

Dear Lill,

The vile reports from Pelham still aggrieve us. You
do concur things cannot proceed in this most ugly
fashion.  

So:  this is final.  No quibbles to the contrary, either.

We are arriving Thursday noon, sharp.  You be packed!

United in love and best wishes, 
Your Three Sisters
 

Exhaling, Lillian rued not keeping her private woes private.  She next pondered how Bert came and 
went pretty much as he damn well pleased, many mornings refusing to convey her to the kitchen, leaving her 
to lay in the squalid bed linen.  Just quarter past ten, she knew he would return for another illicit cache before 
lunch.

     * * *

 “Look out there.”  Disgusted and angry, Bert spat.  “I swear I’ll chop it down.”

 A trio of buzzards circled the nearby storm-blasted oak.  Three others, already roosting on denuded branches, their red and raw heads alerted by his harsh vow, stared back. 

 “Cut it down?”  Squinting through the window screen, Lillian beheld the vulture tree by now all but a Taylor family icon. 

 Bert ceased rinsing out the one-gallon plastic milk jugs, shot her a dirty look.  Tossing aside the funnel and hefting the tray, he stalked off.  Behind the machine shed, the beat-up truck sputtered twice before cranking over.  Accelerating, Bert scraped bottom, fishtailed down the rutty lane, and peeled out for Pelham.   
       
 Alone now, Lillian breathed easier.  Then, just at that moment, a bright breeze rattled the brittle hydrangea stalks.  She bit her lip.  In fantasy, she played a lady of leisure who could stroll through the screen door to the wraparound porch.  Lighting a Viceroy, she would brush her locks, lank and blonde, to sweep up into a vampish bun.  Relaxing further, she might sip from a goblet of vintage wine chilled to perfection.   

 Furious with herself, Lillian broke off the daydream.  Who was she fooling?  Fact was, she wasn’t  walking anywhere anytime soon.  Rheumatism, after all, was debilitating.  She shuddered.  Only 44, her mother, bent double with arthritis and clad in a borrowed calico dress, had been embalmed inside a rather plain crescent-shaped box.  The funeral-goers, their stares frozen as if to gawk through the spiked-down lid, sure drove home disappointed that day.  For all such purposes, Lillian could now see her own crescent-shaped box, open and waiting.  

With the breeze shifting, the sweet smoky aroma of fermenting corn stole over the Joe-Pye weed and rusty farm implements.  Lillian rubbed her eyes.  Up until then, she hadn’t realized how much Bert was unlike her father.  Gazing at the scrub oaks and broomweed pastures, for a long second, she spawned a memory about teeming tassels of corn, her father’s dream to provide only the best for his three daughters.  

Hunching over with a sigh, Lillian tapped the crossword puzzle with a fat pencil.  The last entry had her stumped.  14-Across -- an 8-letter word for a “ne’er-do-well”, started with “d” and ended with “t.”  Bert had also deposited within reach a few crab apples on a chipped saucer.  Conversely, the wheelchair bought by her three older sisters was now history.   

Set-faced, Lillian gripped a small rubber ball.  The kitchen, despite the refrigerator and wood stove and broken radio, felt cavernous and ill kept.  Thank God, the vultures never deserted her.  With tar-and-feathered grace and steadfast presence, they understood about patience and death.  Yet, an implacable sadness crept over her.  Beyond the cattle chute stood the silo where her daddy, one year to the day after her mother’s death, had mysteriously fallen.  Drowning in the shelled corn, his yelps, inch-by-inch, had diminished to a final and dusty gulp.  Then she saw the tin crucifix marking her baby’s grave and looked away.  The farm with its remembrances of those she held most dear also harbored a ton of heartache.  Perplexing to most people, year in and year out, Lillian did her valiant best clinging to the farm.

Absent anything better, Lillian wiped her tear-spattered face on the green baize curtain.  Through the doorway, she regarded Bert’s glossy Gibson guitar propped in the parlor’s corner, then her mother’s prize Singer Sewing Machine tagged for the antique dealer to pick up.  They had no electric lights or telephone.

     * * *
 
Few could pick as much guitar as Bert Maslock could.  During August’s swelter too many years before, when Lillian touted a girl’s dreamlike figure, his folksy guitar had snared her attention.  If Bert’s lyrics, mellow as Webb Pierce’s, weren’t a love song, it sounded by God close enough to Lillian. 

Problems, of course, plagued their romance from the get-go.  Nattily tricked out in a creased suit, a blue bowler, and sharp-toed shoes, Bert was best known around town as a dandy and sop.  Lillian’s sisters never wearied of reminding her of that fact.

 “What if he indulges in a little gin?” Lillian countered.  Flocked around the kitchen table, their faces, flush and nervous, were camouflaged by the kerosene lamp’s golden glow.     
               
 Her oldest sister, Marion, rattled her head bristling with huge pink rollers in her hair.  “My Lord, his family doesn’t amount to a row of rat turds.”

 Isabel, the next oldest, proudly sat painting; the porticoed exterior of the Valentine Museum was quite good.  “It doesn’t hurt a man to work, either,” she declared.  “And Mr. Maslock isn’t exactly a ball of fire, dear.”

 Then Alma, a mere eighteen months older than Lillian, had to get in her licks.  “Besides which, I can’t imagine what you see in Maslock,” she said.  “Is he a fabulous kisser or something?”

 As always, Lillian lashed back.  “Dammit, Bert is my nightingale.  Where’s yours?” she hissed. 

 At Halloween, the couple shared a hayride, surging together behind the slats of alfalfa, flirting in antsy whispers and double-handed petting.  Anytime Bert visited, at least one of Lillian’s sisters chaperoned them.  Late one evening, frost already shellacking the not-yet-harvested corn, Lillian and Bert snaked through the lower cow gate, melted into darkness down to the starlit Rappahannock River.  Thigh-to-thigh, they wrested on a narrow, boggy sandbar for the better part of an hour, barely breaking a sweat when they finally surfaced for air.

 “Can I bum a cigarette?” Lillian had dared to ask him.  

 Soon, what was a vague engagement blossomed into telltale nuptials.  The couple, a match few would’ve ever predicted, exchanged vows in the Methodist Church.  Lillian, slathering in defiance, mentally willed her sisters to attend.  At the organ’s first dismal note, they gingerly slunk across the rearmost pew.

 After Bert moved in with them, her three sisters, dying to make their marks in Richmond, in quick fashion, fled the home place.  Eventually, they ended up residing together in a Gothic brownstone, three bull-headed spinsters aflurry with church socials, watercolors, coffee klatches, gossip-mongering, papier-mâché florals, chamber music, and, of course, bridge.  True to their word, though, they never really left Pelham and kept close tabs on both Lillian and the farm.  

     * * *

 Someone else was now shuffling down the rutty lane.  Caught off-guard, Lillian swatted the rubber ball against the wall.  Amid the sunlight, she caught the flash of a truck swing by, scuffing a red dust cloud.  Sniffling, she sneezed.

 A sallow Yahoo and a boy, obviously his son, clambered out and slammed both doors shut in tandem.  The boy slouched against the fender while the Yahoo trudged onto the porch.

 “Are you lost?” Lillian inquired, her soft voice edged with annoyance.

 “We come for the sewing machine,” the Yahoo muttered to no one in particular.

 “Well, I’m in no way to be of assistance,” she pointed out.

 The Yahoo and boy clomped through the kitchen and guided their return load by grunts.  After lodging the Singer in the truck bed, they cloaked it with a counterpane secured with a stout loop of baling twine.

 Gasping, Lillian averted her face.  The Yahoo hobbled up the steps again and meshed his face against the screen.

 “No room for the couch,” he slurred.

 “It’s not likely to gallop off,” Lillian assured him.

 “I wouldn’t turn down a drink right now.”  The Yahoo’s sudden leer startled Lillian. 

 Her back stiffening a trifle, she snapped:  “Mister, get off my property.”

 Clanging and clattering, the truck crawled away, jouncing over the cattle guard at the end of the rutty lane.  Angry, Lillian wanted to lower the windowpane.  Instinctively she reached behind her chair for the crutches.  They, too, were gone.  Helpless, she sat glued to the chair, the solitary spot where Bert had planted her.

  The Pontiac Bonneville popped into Lillian’s mind before it plowed through the paling fence and glided to a glorious stop just inches short of the front steps.  When the horn honked, the vultures awoke.   

 The Taylor sisters had arrived.

 Stomping up the flagstone walk, Marion bellowed, “You-who, Lill!  You home, honeypot?

 “I’m in the kitchen!” came the muffled reply from the rear of the house.

 Their light orthopedic shoes twinkling over the plank floor, the three sisters invaded the mannish parlor.  Stealthily, Isabel hid a half-empty bottle of bootleg hooch under the orange sofa.  Too late.  Marion’s eyes narrowed; her thin lips went taut.  

 Scowling at Bert’s guitar profiling there like a dancehall whore, Marion grasped the flimsy neck, flailed it against the windowsill again and again.  Strings, frets, the bridge, plates of polished wood flew everywhere.  For an encore, she wrathfully seized the hooch bottle and shattered it.   

 Upset, Lillian grounded her palms on the table’s edge, as if to stand.  In the next instance, she broke down, sobbing into her fists, her shoulders jerking up and down, her shallow chest caving in.  Her sisters bustled over, proffering her a box of Kleenex, patting her head, denouncing Bert, and generally consoling her.

 “Why did you do that?” Lillian finally managed to ask.

  Isabel intervened.  “Never mind, dear.  Where’s your wheelchair?”

 “You see, Bert’s between jobs and we came up short.” Lillian tried to explain.

 Marion glared at her.  “Do you see now why I did what I did?” 

 In the end, they transported Lillian still in the ladder-back chair to the Pontiac’s vast rear seat.  When Lillian timidly requested a few minutes to see the home place one last time, Isabel convinced the others to go along. 

 “Suits me,” Marion said.  “Meantime, I’ll go cut some flowers for Sunday’s service.”

 While they sweated inside the Pontiac, Isabel held Lillian’s hand, tenderly squeezing it.  Alma rescued a praying mantis strutting across the dashboard.  

 “Where will I stay?” Lillian asked.

 “Why, you’ll move in with us, dear,” Isabel replied.  “We’ll take good care of you.  You’ll see.”

 “What will become of the farm?” Lillian worried.

 “Oh, we’ll sell it for a mint, naturally,” disclosed Alma. 

 Marion returned, the fierce tiger lilies banded inside an aluminum foil ball.  She wedged in beside Alma. The Pontiac rumbled to life like a diesel truck.  Alma circled the yard to creak down the rutty lane.

 “Do you smell smoke?”  Lillian stirred.

 Up front, Marion shifted in her seat, checked the rearview mirror, and smiled.  Snickering, Alma reached over and flipped on the car radio.  Webb Pierce was crooning “He’s in the Jailhouse Now.”

 “The guest room is so comfy,” Isabel promised.  “You’ll love it, dear.”  

 On the outskirts of Pelham, they passed Trooper Jett in his police cruiser headed the way that they’d just come.  Alma nodded at him and, smiling like the butcher’s dog, he waved back, then mashed on the gas.

                             * * *

 By the time Bert returned from Pelham, he realized that he’d missed lunch.  His mood ran decidedly joyful -- the black market seemed bottomless. ; Before getting drunk and picking some tunes, however, he needed to stoke the coals cooking the kettles behind the machine shed.  Driving up, he was surprised to encounter the Yahoo and his boy standing in front of a smoldering heap.

 “Oh Hell.”  Bert stopped, then lurched and stumbled from the cab. 

 The Yahoo was hunching his sloped shoulders.  “We just got here ourselves.” 

 Groaning, Bert stared at the char and the ashy metal, disbelief ruining his otherwise handsome stage looks.

 “Damn waste of fine mash.”  The Yahoo shook his head.  “Damn waste of a fine guitar, too.”

 Bert found himself running, the distant house receding.  Maybe it hadn’t really happened, this ugly turn of affairs.  Then he remembered the wheelchair, and the crutches, and the crippling smack made when you finally have to face the music.
 

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ED LYNSKEY'S work has appeared in such online venues as MISSISSIPPI REVIEW, DEAD MULE, and PLOTS WITH GUNS.