Out the Summerhill Road: A Novel

Mary Martha

Part 2: 1980 • The Women of Cold Springs 29 Mary Martha On Tuesday morning Mary Martha is awakened earlier than usual by the noisy coupling of alley cats. When she looks out her window, the cats are nowhere in sight, but she notices the unseasonable fog drifting through her azaleas and down into the dry creek bed that runs alongside her bedroom windows . This kind of thinking is what she has managed to avoid most of her life. Her imagination knows no bounds when she thinks of it: at first the easy sweetness, then the barely noticeable drift leading to the blood rush, and, after that, there is no turning back from the maelstrom of sex. She has seen it happen to her friends, seen them forever swept into the endless whirlpool of demanding husbands and faithless lovers and careless children. As if the cats and the fog are not enough, yesterday she had seen a gray-headed man standing beside a smoking car on I-30. Unable to believe it was Jackson Morris, she stopped and then she had seen the smile, the blue eyes, the sauntered walk as he came towards her. “I’d rather pick up a snake,” she told herself before speeding off. Glancing in the mirror, she saw a man with his hands on his hips, standing as if lost in the middle of the highway. Was the man Jackson? In the bright light of morning she is not at all sure. What with the cats and the fog and the man, Mary Martha ’s world is off balance this morning. She picks up Jane Austen ’s Letters and tries to read, but the words before her eyes make no sense. She turns her face into the pillow and closes her eyes. There is no escape from the past. If she could change the past, do it over, she might tell the truth, the whole truth. f She had been fifteen, and Jackson Morris had asked her for a date! She had gone to the Park to meet him. She had seen 30 Out the Summerhill Road him jump into Rosemary’s convertible. She had heard him say, “How do you know I’m not the Peeping Tom?” And then Rosemary and her friend had been murdered. A week after Rosemary’s murder, a Texas Ranger had come to her house. He came, hat in hand, apologizing to her parents . “I need to ask your daughter, Mary Martha, isn’t it, a question or two.” “She doesn’t know a thing about it. Terrible isn’t it? Some outsider. A tramp riding the rails, maybe. A soldier, even.” “Mr. Mercer, that may be. But we need to talk to her, and I just thought, considering how young she is that. . . .” “She’s just a child.” “Yes sir. I thought it would be better here in her own house than down at the station.” Nodding, her father had stepped out of the room and called up the stairs: “Mary Martha, baby, come on down here. Ranger Gonzales wants to ask you some questions.” When she had entered the room, she had seen the Texas Ranger towering over her father. She had seen the gun in the holster at his waist and the white cowboy hat in his hand. She sat on the sofa between her mother and her father to answer the Ranger’s questions. “Mary Martha. I understand you saw Jackson Morris leaving the Park the next morning?” Ranger Gonzales said. “Yes!” she said, eager to say it. “I was coming home from Sarah’s slumber party, and I saw him stepping out of the woods. When he saw daddy’s car, he ran back into the woods behind the springs.” “Now, you know this boy pretty well, do you? You sure it was Jackson?” She had seen the Ranger was ready to doubt her. It was in his eyes. “I’ve known him all my life,” she had answered truthfully. “Mary Martha, do you like Jackson?” Part 2: 1980 • The Women of Cold Springs 31 “Not anymore,” she had said, bursting into tears. “I’m afraid of him now.” And this, too, was the truth. Then Mary Martha had seen her daddy’s face, frozen into impenetrable stiffness, as he ushered the man toward the front door. “This is an ugly business,” her daddy said. “My daughter is not involved. Not involved...