It's Not the Heat: Stories

By Hadley Hury

At a wedding reception a woman encounters a lover, and an image of herself, she has not seen in more than twenty years. On a road-trip a father listens to the conversation of his two adolescent daughters and hears between the lines previously undetected clues to their changing identities. A man confronts the loss of his wife of many decades by recognizing a new means of communication and reunion. Disconcerted by the weirdly converging dreams and sightings of a boyhood acquaintance, an Episcopal priest searches for meaning among shifting shards of memory, chance, and intention. A retired couple establish a bond of trust with a neglected child and find themselves goaded into an unexpected future of perplexity and promise.

All of these characters are poised on the brink of change-sometimes only vaguely understood, sometimes unmistakably life-altering and irreversible. In every case these changes afford a degree of revelation and make some urgent demand for new assessment, perspective, action.

The ten stories in this collection by Hadley Hury are set primarily in the South, many in and around Memphis, and examine with tough wit and expansive spirit its people and the place. But like any good stories, they defy the limited focus of regionalism and explore the universal anatomies of love, vulnerability, loss, humor, and hope.

Praise for Hury's The Edge of the Gulf-

In Hury's engrossing suspense novel a deadly mystery combines with the greater mystery of the protagonist's loss and recovery to illustrate beautifully the resilience of the human spirit An assured debut.

-Publishers Weekly

This first novel offers complex characters, subtle intrigue, well-crafted prose, and a small-town, oceanfront ethos.

-Library Journal

a powerful work of psychological suspense.

-Allreaders.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 23, 2007
• ISBN: 9780595860753

Hadley Hury

Hadley Hury?s novel The Edge of the Gulf was published to excellent national reviews in in 2003. His short fiction has appeared in Green Mountains Review, Ginger, Colorado Review, and Image. A teacher and former film critic, he and his wife divide their time between Memphis and Rugby, Tennessee.

Book preview

IT’S NOT THE HEAT

stories

by Hadley Hury

iUniverse, Inc.

New York Lincoln Shanghai

It’s Not the Heat

stories

Copyright © 2006 by Hadley Hury

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.

iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

iUniverse

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1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

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.

Coming Back originally appeared in Green Mountains Review; Till It Hurts in Image; and Hit-Man for Jesus, in slightly different form, in The Edge of the Gulf, Poisoned Pen Press, 2003.

Cover art: Valerie Berlin’s Casey, oil, private collection.

ISBN-13: 978-0-595-41735-3 (pbk)

ISBN-13: 978-0-595-86075-3 (ebk)

ISBN-10: 0-595-41735-3 (pbk)

ISBN-10: 0-595-86075-3 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments

HACKBERRY

NO GOING BACK

IT’S NOT THE HEAT

COMING BACK

TILL IT HURTS

ALONG THE BORDER

SYLLABUS

ALL WE KNOW OF LOVE

SOMETHING

HIT-MAN FOR JESUS

About the Author

to

Hannah Rose

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order: the continuous thread of revelation.

—Eudora Welty

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Ashley Pillow, Robin and Dan Hatzenbuehler, Lucilla Garrett, Sara and Leonard Frey, Anastasia Herin, Elizabeth Phillips—and, as always, my wife, Marilyn Adams Hury—who read and commented on many of these stories, and to Janet Baker-Carr for her helpfulness.

HACKBERRY

I told them again today.

I don’t want to be any trouble to you.

They know this is not the passive-aggressive protestation of an old man, though I can see in their eyes that they’re less sure what it adds up to mean, just exactly how it applies.

They met here, as they have sometimes begun to do in these last months (no doubt feeling the need for a simultaneous reading so that they can better compare notes afterward), on their ways home after work, Hollis arriving first with a new book of Sunday New York Times crossword puzzles—I have still been driving to the market and a couple of other places within three or four blocks, but no longer across town—and minutes later, Mark, grousing, but only in his usual light ironic way about some meeting that had dragged on. We sat out on the deck; only October and early November can compete with late April and early May as the best time for it. Hollis had a glass of wine and Mark and I a scotch and it seemed, to me anyway, that we floated in the soft, soft air, and the dancing shadows of the old arching hackberry, the willow oak, and the lustrous stand of laurels that hover companionably along the south edge.

I need to get after those peonies, said Hollis, maybe sometime Sunday afternoon. Aren’t there some stakes in the shed?

What? Oh, yes, I think so. After the morning’s showers, the scent of the new leaves, some late narcissus and, most flagrantly, the peonies, made me even giddier than the scotch.

I could feel her looking at me, and Mark, as he had done so often growing up, looking at her. He wore a bowtie today, very smart, very trim, with his longish curly hair and horn-rimmed glasses, very much the teacher of nineteenth-century British literature.

Hollis’s hair was loosely pulled up and had one of those clamp things in it and she had on slacks and a pullover; she must’ve had an informal day in the studio. She is a producer with the local educational television station.

We are all teachers in one way or another—I retired from the same college, in American history, where Mark is now tenured—and our history is one of trying to tell one another what to do.

A nurse early on, Margaret had eventually chosen to be a full-time home-maker, gardener—then arborist, and a bemused but patient civic activist.

She regularly laughed at the three of us.

He had been looking out through the large trees to the distant reaches of the three-acre yard, out where it sloped gently up on the right and out of sight into a thick copse that bordered the neighbor’s property and down on the other side to an outcropping of rocks above the small creek that separated the property from the long field that ran for hundreds of yards over to the Presbyterian church.

It was across this field that the tornado had gathered force before it bore down at the end of the yard on that morning last June. They had just gotten into the basement when they heard the sucking roar and the unholy splinter and crash of trees.

When they emerged, the first thing he saw was that the trees nearest the house and stand of oaks and tupelos and locusts down on the right were perfectly intact. Later he would realize that the funnel touched down, and then lifted, pulled up suddenly, just there, out in that middle space in the back of the yard.

But not before it had taken Margaret’s favorite white oaks, a hundred years old at least, the majestic sycamore, and the most graceful of the ancient tulip poplars, and thrown them about in chaotic piles. Dismembered and entangled, they lay on the ground dying without dignity, shuddering in the light breeze of the aftermath. From the edge of the creek, the stench of ozone from the ancient cedar that had splintered halfway up rushed at them as they stood just outside the basement door. As they watched it rocking on itself, as though trying to hold its ripped flesh, it creaked a mournful keen in the sick green light, sighed heavily, and sheared to the ground.

She never had to say what a cruelty this was, the unkindest cut, nearly as hard as the dying. That morning all he could do was go to her, repeatedly, and hold her tight for minutes at a time. She had never once cried over her fugitive health, but that evening, looking out through the long twilight to the improbable carnage, she wept like a child, and she could not speak a word of it for weeks. When he arranged for the crew to come and clear, they had to spend the entire day doing errands, going out to lunch, a movie—though she already had begun needing to spend most of her time at home. On the third and last day of the chain saws and removal, she was forced to stay in and rest; from eight in the morning until six that afternoon she remained in the bedroom, for the first and only time in her life, watching television with the volume turned up.

Is that a new tree out there? Mark asked, following my gaze and narrowing his eyes. Not those staked ones from November—that smaller one? He got up and stood at the railing and looked out to the distant open space where nine young trees stood, the chartreuse of their new leaves glowing in the last vivid slant of light.

One of the maples didn’t come out. I had it taken out and was going to have them replace it, but I found that volunteer over on the creek side and moved it two or three weeks ago. A hackberry.

You moved it? Hollis frowned.

Not hard, didn’t take long.

And here I am worrying about staking the peonies? Hollis tried for a humorous tone but her worried eyes didn’t play along.

Ah—I don’t know anything about that. But your mother did teach me a few things about planting trees. So there’s a credit to use now at the nursery.

I think that was probably about as peremptory, even brusque, as I ever saw her, Mark said, as much to himself as to us. He took a sip of his drink and then looked at us.

Remember? Years ago, a party here, I don’t remember the occasion. Somebody happened to say that hackberries were ‘just trash trees’. She gave him a quick but forceful little lecture. ‘Simply because they were so prolifically indigenous and volunteered, they were not trash trees, that if you took all the hackber-ries out of the canopy in Memphis you’d be removing perhaps a third of all trees, that the hackberry is, one of our most graceful trees, indeed, it is …’

The Southern elm, Hollis said.

I smile, the easiest in a long time. I can feel it linger and it is, apparently, so unstudied that they smile, too.

I see you have your infamous lists, all those legal pads, working in there, she nodded toward the study.

Oh, just more—arrangements. I think we’re all straight with the paperwork and all that—unless you have any questions.

They shook their heads.

All that. Other things. I have the home health care people lined up. I’ve put in a request for Nurse Ratched but they can’t promise. Said a male might be better. I told them they hadn’t seen Nurse Ratched in action.

The pain? asks Mark.

The new stuff works well enough.

And the sleeping pills at night?

And the sleeping pills at night.

What else have you been up to besides wrangling trees?

Boxes.

Things are pretty well squared away now. But there has remained so much to do, these past ten or twelve weeks. It’s reminded me of our getting ready to go away for weeks at a time in the summers. Only more so, of course.

This actually began before December. When congestive heart disease is coupled with emphysema it moves right along, but—after the last hospital duration and her refusal ever to return, and before the home healthcare people came—there had been almost a year. She didn’t want me to have to cope later, and it gave her a focus once she became less able to get about easily. We would stand in the basement or the attic, the garage or guestrooms, and I would open up, pull down, dig out, sift through—hold it out to her—and she would make the call. She was very clear on most designations, rarely hesitated. Neither of us could uninterruptedly believe the brisk humor in this show of efficiency, this ruthless-ness, as though we were simply doing a vigorous spring cleaning, but we managed. We got through a lot and now, of course, it seems so incredibly fortunate.

Or, wise.

And now I have finished up. There won’t be much for them to wonder over or bother about.

There will be the actual discovery, but that, too, will be as clean and unprob-lematic as I can make it. Beyond a certain point there is nothing I can do about that, anyway: there must always be the discovery.

We spent hours with my rough sketches drawn badly to scale, planning where each should go. Throughout October, in good weather and when she could break free of the bed, she would sit in the wheelchair and look at the latest drawing, work her reading glasses off around the oxygen feed, and look out, reconsidering seasonal light, height, moisture flow, branch span.

The nursery men came the first week of November, five weeks to the day before she died. Most nurseries don’t even have trees available until much later; I spent a small fortune finding someone who would even bother with the special order.

But they had come, the stumps out in the gaping scar had been ground up, and we had a beautiful cool morning, bundled up on the deck, having green tea, watching them go in, one by one taking their places: oaks—three whites and a chestnut, two tulip poplars, two maples, a red cedar and a sycamore.

You’ll sit here and watch them grow through their childhood, she said.

But that is not to be.

In January, he receives a gift—a little late for Christmas but certainly one of the most magical of his life. Recurring indigestion has taken him, reluctantly, to his doctor. Within five days, and after some tests, he is diagnosed with advanced metastatic cancer of the pancreas; other organs are fully involved; as few as four months, certainly no more than seven.

When I knew that Mark and Hollis were about to leave, I felt myself waver. But then Mark said something funny, and the moment passed. Mark helped me up and they walked on either side, their hands at my elbows, to the front door. I hugged them both and, even inside their gentleness, I could feel my body like some stalky bird or one of those pipe-cleaner figures we made when we were children. Always thin, in four months I have become a phantom of my former self.

Mark said to call him if I needed anything—promise?—and headed up the walk. Hollis turned at the edge of the porch, kissed me and held both my hands. I love you.

I know you do. And you know I love you.

A lot depends on Hollis, but he trusts her. In so far as she can know in this unforecastable journey we call life, she will do what they have agreed on. She is serious and thoughtful, sensible—moral, really—and doesn’t say things she doesn’t mean.

He is sitting in the study now. Once the most real, the most secure and comforting place in the world, it has become, like every other room and every other place in the world, gray, distant, filmed with impenetrable unfamiliarity. He gets down a small wedge of cheese, three crackers, some milk.

More and more often, in these last weeks, I have been speaking of myself not only in the present tense but in the third person. As a historian I first noticed the advent of this trend in the profession with disdain. Some of the new younger hires in the department lectured that way: And so, with the death of Cromwell’s son, the days of the Commonwealth are numbered. The exiled king prepares to return to the throne as Charles II … It seemed, at first, an affectation to him, something academics, titillated to be on television documentaries, did to sex up their material. But over time he has come to appreciate the use of the present tense in telling the stories that we call history. (One of Mark’s favorite stories is about the exchange he heard between English and history colleagues at a cocktail party. The history professor says, Well, you know, we both are telling the same story, it’s all the same story. Oh, yes, I know, answers the English prof, it’s just that our version is so much better written.)

I still, of course, speak to you directly, darling. But more and more it has seemed appropriate to speak of myself as he: it helps me deal more carefully with what I’m doing, it helpfully objectifies things. And, of course, since December third, it has taken no time at all for me to realize there has ceased to be a gen-

uine I .

In the hall on his way to the bathroom, he is felled by a blow of pain in his gut. He leans against the wall and then actually has to slide slowly down, and sit, crumpled on his right side, until even a semblance of breathing resumes. His mind occupies itself by ticking its way down the checklist again.

Mark and his wife have no particular interest in the house. They married late, have no children and don’t plan to have any, and they’re happy in their old bungalow near both the college and the public relations firm in which Gwen is vice-president. Rambling fifties ranches aren’t their thing.

At fifty-three Hollis seems contentedly divorced after four years. Although it doesn’t seem to be on the horizon, and he regrets that, she might, of course, remarry at some point. But if she should, and what happens then, or whether she stays in the house until she dies at ninety and then the entire neighborhood is razed for a shopping mall, are things he can’t concern himself with now. For the foreseeable future, this will be her home. She has some inkling, enough he thinks, of what the new grove of trees means, and he will leave instructions—one of his notorious lists—for their care.

There’s plenty of money, and Mark’s share will include an added amount equal to the value of the house.

The home of my youth will become the home of my maturity, Hollis had said with a grave smile.

I like that, he had said. And, he asked, it won’t trouble you that your old parents died here?

No.

He had trouble picturing his granddaughter Susannah in the house. Seventeen now, she would go off to college next year. But, then, they’d had trouble picturing her there or anywhere else during the recent, unappealing, years ofher adolescence. She seemed to have all of Hollis’s seriousness and none of her talent or humor. She had been a pleasant enough child, but with puberty had come chronic sulks, even, it seemed to him, a deep-rooted sullenness. He found himself almost furious when, in her last visit to the house—clearly forced by Hollis—before Margaret died, she had not broken her aloofness even for a moment. Oh, it’s a phase. Most girls are unhappy at this age, Margaret had tried to reassure him. And, of course, this is a hard thing for her. She had picked up her favorite photo of Susannah, at eleven (before the net descended), open-eyed and jolly. She’ll be this way again. Some day. And, besides, my love, that’s something we simply can’t do anything about.

He has made it to the bathroom closet and found what he needs. He returns now to the study and sits, heavily and with a tinge of anxiety. Every time he has lowered himself recently, some part of his brain wonders whether he’ll be able to get back up. And that must not happen, now.

It is dark. He has only a couple of lamps on.

He will sit here for a few minutes, or an hour if need be. He is more than ready, but he is taking extraordinary care. The medications, his decay, or both, have made him forgetful.

After whatever time it may be, he speaks into the silence.

Well, what are we waiting for, my dearest? He heaves himself up, goes to the bar, pours a scotch and knocks it back.

To you. To us.

And then he begins taking the pills: the Librium from a new prescription filled the day before she died, his own Ambien, two full prescriptions that he has hoarded, staring instead into the blackness at night, doing the crossword puz-zles—oddly, he could no longer bear to read—or simply roaming the dim rooms, a wheezing skeleton muttering to himself, geographically directionless in the shadowy house but fueled with purpose.

He takes a few of them at a time (some baguette, some ovate, all small and despite the moment, looking so tiny and innocuous) as quickly as he can get them down with water; surprisingly soon they all are gone.

He crosses the room and picks up the two old lightweight cotton quilts that he has laid earlier by the door to the deck, and then, with the small throw pillow and flashlight—and without even a thought of looking back—starts out.

It envelopes him, this warm fragrant heady spring night and, through his whispery shallow breathing—even through these already alien, dry, parchment-like nostrils—a tinge of early honeysuckle comes to him.

He pricks his way very slowly, in excruciating pain now, leaning into the tall stick that he has kept by the foot of steps. In the other wasted arm he half-drags the quilts and pillow, tucked into his ribs, and the bobbling flashlight.

Their last walk in the yard had been in the late afternoon after the nurserymen had gone. It was an ordeal and he had to fight through waves of fear as strong as any he had ever known. He had carried her down the deck stairs. They had made it across the level grassy area in the wheelchair, and then, near the base of the huge old willow oak, she waited while he went back for the walker. She hadn’t been