The Truth According to Us (59 page)

He swung around, hardly breathing.

She heaved a sigh so deep it must have started at her ankles. “Poor Felix,” she murmured. “Poor old Felix.”

She reached out and took my hand, the one that wasn't holding Father's. They didn't touch, they didn't say another word, but we made a chain, the three of us, and that was fine. That was fine for a start.

In the quiet, I lay back and looked at the sky. It was a circle, what I could see, a circle of blue over our house. Just on the edges there were a few green leaves, ruffling a little, and some spots of gold that shimmered and waved until my eyes crossed and then closed and I went to sleep.

When I woke up, Jottie was still beside me, but Father was gone. I didn't mind. He'd be back.

Jottie broke it off with Sol not long after that. He got married within the month, to a Maryland lady no one knew, but it didn't last, and by the next summer he was back on our porch again, somehow managing to appear only when Father was away. Bird reckoned he spied on us from inside the sewer pipe, but however it was, he knew when he could climb the stairs and take a wicker chair. He must have spent a thousand nights that way, listening to Jottie and the rest of us and then walking back to his house alone. Even then I wondered how it could be enough for him, but I guess it was more than he had expected for himself, except during those few weeks when he thought he had won his war with my father.

Father came and went the way he always had. I never knew exactly what he was doing, and of course it was no use to ask him. I think he did sell chemicals, sometimes, but I don't know. Late in 1940, he came home from a trip with his leg badly broken. He said he'd been thrown from the top of a railroad car by an enraged animal trainer. Jottie said she didn't know anyone who was
more
likely to be thrown from the top of a railroad car than Father, but she also said that didn't mean she believed him. She fussed over him with pillows and breakfast trays, and
he laughed and let her, and I was as content as I would ever be in my life, because I knew where he was.

Father was never quite as fast after that. His leg hurt him, and he was getting old, too. He still disappeared, sometimes for weeks, but he didn't come back with as much money, and I think what he got was hard-won. I remember one night—in 1943—he came home during a terrific storm. The electricity was out, and he mumbled something about how we should count our blessings and went upstairs to bed. We didn't know what he meant until the next morning, when Jottie came into the kitchen looking like she was about to faint. She wouldn't even let me see him for two days. I guess he'd been beaten up pretty bad.

Jottie picked up the slack. She continued working for the Writers' Project—without their knowing it—until it folded. Some of the books were pretty silly. She wrote a book about water sports on the Potomac that nearly killed her. But writing grew on her, and after she was done with project guides and histories, she took up writing mysteries, most of them about a dead librarian who went poking her ghostly nose into other folks' business. She sent herself into stitches writing those books, and she got four of them published, too. She said she was just trying to earn an honest crust, but I know she liked writing, and she liked being an authoress. I never in my life heard her laugh so hard as the day the Beacon Light Ladies' Study Club invited her to come speak on the subject of “Modern Literature and Good Taste.” She went, though, and she bought a big black hat to impress them in.

The war began just as the Writers' Project breathed its last, and then, of course, the farms prospered. Jottie had a lot to do to manage them after Emmett enlisted, but she set her hand to it, and before long Wren Spurling got the shakes every time he saw her coming. Once the war was over, and you could get gasoline again, Jottie and Father traveled. She said she'd had a circumscribed youth and it was time she saw the world. Father drove. They went to New York and California and other places. I always hoped they were running whiskey into dry states, because Jottie would have relished that, but I never knew for sure.

Those were good years for them both. Jottie lodged all of us on this
earth, but no one more than my father, and he recognized it and was grateful. As for her, I believe she knew all along that hatred was a poor bone to chew; she had been trying to hate Vause Hamilton for years, and she saw, after it was over, that it would have dried her to dust if she'd succeeded. It was the same with Father. The truth of other people is a ceaseless business. You try to fix your ideas about them, and you choke on the clot you've made.

Besides, Jottie and Father had loved the same person, and each knew where the other went for dreams. In the years that followed the sesquicentennial, Father and Jottie came to talk about Vause Hamilton like he'd just left the room. Between them, he was a little alive, always, but they knew better than to weaken that faint heartbeat by speaking of him before others. He was theirs in private, and when I heard of him, it was only because I sat so quiet they'd forgotten I was there.

In 1940, Minerva surprised everyone—including herself, I expect—by producing a daughter, my cousin Elizabeth. Not to be outdone, Mae had a son, whom she insisted on naming Omar. Waldon almost put his foot down about that, but not quite.

Layla and Emmett got married on New Year's Day of 1939, after she had finished grilling him on everything he had done in his entire life, Emmett said. He pretended to be exasperated about that, but he wasn't. They held the wedding in our parlor, fresh-dusted for the occasion, with Jottie as the bridesmaid.

Somewhere along the line, I forgave Layla. I'm not sure when. On the day she got married, I watched her walk down our hall to the parlor, hanging on to the arm of the senator's fancy suit, and I didn't forgive her a thing. I thought about her lifting up her face to Father's to be kissed, right there where she was walking. She thought about it, too, I could tell. She looked at me as she turned toward the parlor, and her face went pale. I was glad.

A few years later, it had all melted away. Why? I can't tell you. Right after the war, Bird and I went to see Emmett one day. He'd gotten shot up in the Kasserine Pass, and he'd just had the second operation on his shoulder. He couldn't drive or do anything, and Layla asked us please
to come out and entertain him. So we drove up to White Creek, Bird and me, in Jottie's new car. Over the course of our drive, we summoned up what we thought were some real amusing anecdotes, but when we saw Emmett there on his porch, looking like he'd been run over, they fled our mind and we just sat and stared at him. He'd always been so tall and strong, so generally big, and there he was, white as a sheet and shrunken up with pain. We didn't know what to do. Layla saw our faces and came out and sat down. She started talking real nicely, asking us questions about school and our dates and Jottie and whether Father was away on business. At first we answered stiffly, casting glances at Emmett, but as she went on, we relaxed and started to talk. We told stories and made fun of people, like usual, and Emmett smiled, even if he didn't talk much. But I watched. I saw him shift his good arm over the side of his chair so that one of his fingers touched Layla's skin, and I saw her look at him. As we walked back along their drive to our car, I said to Bird, “I don't hate her anymore.” I was kind of surprised to come to it.

“Yeah.” She nodded. “Seems like her days as a harbinger are over.”

Over the long course of writing
The Truth According to Us
, I found myself requiring expertise about—or at least a nodding acquaintance with—a wide array of 1930s phenomena: products, machinery, diversions, occurrences, and individuals. The quest for authenticity is a task both endlessly receding and endlessly fascinating, and though I was time and again obliged to curtail my ravening curiosity in order to get on with the job, research was one of the few unalloyed pleasures of my creative process. There is no thrill like the thrill of finding the name of the manufacturer of the top brand of cream separator in 1938. A full accounting of my sources would run about fifty pages, but I'd like to acknowledge here some of the larger debts.

Like nearly every author who has written about the Federal Writers' Project, I relied upon
The Dream and the Deal
, Jerre Mangione's lively history of that improbable program. William F. McDonald's more sober
Federal Relief Administration and the Arts
was also valuable. For specifics about West Virginia, Jerry Bruce Thomas's
An Appalachian New Deal: West Virginia in the Great Depression
supplied me with helpful information about the state's resistance to Roosevelt and the New Deal. Likewise, Dr. Thomas's article “The Nearly Perfect State,” about the political controversies surrounding the Federal Writers' Project's state guide to West Virginia, offered extremely useful background.

The History of Macedonia
is, of course, an imaginary publication, but it was modeled on a 1937 history book entitled
Historic Romney
, produced by the Federal Writers' Project for the town council of Romney,
West Virginia. I have also used
West Virginia: A Guide to the Mountain State
, the Project's state guide, as both a model and a source of information. Berkeley County, in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia, is home to a magnificent, professional-grade historical society. I was lucky enough to visit their archive early in the course of my work, and several of their publications have been key resources, particularly A
Martinsburg Picture Book
, which was both a good visual reference and a spur to the imagination.

In investigating the Works Progress Administration and the Federal Writers' Project, all roads lead to the Library of Congress, which has by far the world's largest collection of original documents and papers from those programs. While most researchers in this archive are interested in materials relating to the big-name authors who worked on the Project, I was looking for administrative correspondence, regulations, and instruction manuals, which are harder to find. I am therefore grateful to my sister, Sally Barrows, for doing the sleuthing—and ordering the photocopies!—that made these materials available to me.

Virtually all other research took place at the University Library at the University of California in Berkeley, for the proximity of which I give thanks daily. Histories of labor relations in the southern textile industry in the 1930s, the 1938 Sears catalog, advertisements for finishing schools in West Virginia in 1920, World War I songbooks, 1938 restaurant menus, specifications of safes manufactured in the United States in 1919,
LIFE
magazines, Federal Writers' Project publications of unimaginable unimportance—these are just some of the treasures I needed and found in the University Library.

Obviously,
The Truth
was not built on facts alone. Or, indeed, at all. Fiction was by far the more fractious element of the compound, and I owe enormous thanks to my editors at Random House for their contributions to the making of this novel. Susan Kamil, the first and most faithful advocate of my work, endured some terrible early drafts and labored long and hard to help me excavate the story I was trying to tell. Kara Cesare was invaluable in guiding the craft in the latter part of its journey, and I am deeply grateful for the attention, appreciation, and
kindness she brought to the project. Dana Isaacson's positive response came at an opportune moment and was greatly appreciated.

Throughout this long and convoluted process, my agent, Liza Dawson, has manifested true Macedonian ferocity and devotion, and I am profoundly and permanently grateful to her. I do not believe that this book would exist had it not been for her efforts.

Closer to home, I'd like to express my thanks to my mother, Cynthia Barrows, chief teller of family stories, chief authority in all matters West Virginian, and tireless answerer of annoying questions about regional speech. Thanks also to my father, John Barrows, for his historical contributions and for allowing me to test him on certain points. A few people read the manuscript in various states of undress; I am indebted to Alicia Malet Klein, who read it
twice
, and to Margo Hackett, who loved what I loved and consequently made me feel like I wasn't insane. Thanks, too, to Lisa McGuinness and Tom Klein for their good opinions.

Even closer to home—inside it, in fact—is my best reader, Jeffrey Goldstein. He has read every word of every version of this book and has nonetheless managed to remain interested in the book's characters, integrity, and fate. From the very beginning to the very end, he has always understood what I was aiming for, and he has always liked what he was reading. When everyone else, including me, wanted to throw the manuscript off a cliff, he believed in it. Grateful is too chilly a word, but he, as usual, will know what I mean.