Chapter 6
August 8, 1959
"Mandy! Mandy! Amanda Jane McCain!"
A chubby, curly-headed little boy waved excitedly, running across the country club's eighteenth green toward the three girls. Christi Boudreaux, Kelly McCain, and Kelly's seven-year-old sister Mandy paused and squinted into the sunlight.
"Who's that?" Kelly asked.
"Warren Coulter," the youngest girl grinned shyly. "He was at Miss Cooper's Kindergarten with me." Mandy paused, then added, "He's kinda cute, don't you think?"
The older girls leaned on their golf clubs, waiting for the sweating, panting boy.
"Hi," he said quietly to Mandy, suddenly discovering his feet when he was close enough to talk.
"Hi," Mandy answered, staring at the same feet through her Coke-bottle glasses.
"Well, hi," Warren repeated with all the finesse his seven-year-old mind could muster.
"Yeah, hi," Mandy agreed, nodding her head and causing her very blond ponytails to bounce in the sunlight.
"Who's that?" Warren questioned, motioning toward Christi and then Kelly, whose attention was focused on an older boy approaching them.
"This is my sister's friend Christi Boudreaux and this is my sister Kelly," Mandy answered.
"What?" Kelly asked absently, hearing her name, but not taking her eyes from the stranger striding toward them with his golf bag in tow.
"Hi," Warren grinned up at her.
"Hi," Kelly responded automatically, without a glance at him.
The older boy, a tall, teen-aged, even-better-looking version of Warren Coulter, now stood a putter's length from Kelly and stared into her pale green eyes. He smiled and the world stood still. Kelly returned the smile, immobilized by the feeling that came from deep inside. Something in her floated free and went to him. Without taking her eyes from him, Kelly sensed that the grass had become a deeper green, the sky a brighter blue, and the puffy clouds a purer white edged with the gold of the sun.
"Hi, I'm Cameron Coulter," he said, as if that would explain everything.
"Kelly McCain," she responded by rote, unable to think of anything interesting to say.
And then he was gone and Kelly had no idea when or how she would ever see him again.
"I'm thirsty," Mandy complained. "Why did you two have to talk so long?"
Kelly frowned, "What do you mean, 'talk so long?' We barely said hello."
"And then where you go to school and how you're both taking golf lessons and will play in the tournament next month and that he plays the sax and you play the piano and you both love Elvis Presley and fifty-seven Chevies and you both know how to drive already and you can't except on the country roads and that you love to be out in the sun and get a tan and that he burns and was about to burn up now and so he went to the clubhouse, which reminds me that I'm thirsty."
"Well, we can't go to the clubhouse because he'll think I'm chasing after him, so you'll have to get a lemonade by the pool."
Mandy grinned because she actually preferred being near the water rather than in the dark paneled clubhouse where men smoked cigars and played the noisy slot machines in the back.
"May I go swimming?" she asked, without holding much hope. Christi shrugged.
"Sure," Kelly agreed, parking their golf bag by the locker room doors.
"Let's change into our swimsuits before we get the lemonade," Kelly suggested.
"May I have a candy bar with my lemonade?" Mandy dared to ask.
"Just this once, but don't tell I let you," Kelly warned.
Mandy was so delighted with her older sister's leniency that she waited until Christi's mother dropped them off at home to act like a seven-year-old.
"Kelly's got a boyfriend!" Mandy sang as she skipped up the front walk to their big white frame house. "Kelly's got a boyfriend! Kelly's got a boyfriend!"
"You hush or I'll jerk a knot in your…"
"What's all this about a boyfriend, Miss Mandy?" their daddy challenged from the front porch.
"Kelly met a boy and she got so weird you should have seen her!"
Clayton McCain smiled at his two precious daughters and leaned back in the rocker, resting in the porch shade after trimming shrubs all morning. He enjoyed physical labor, and though he no longer wrestled alligators as he once did in Panama, he liked to keep his six-foot frame in shape. He had a deep tan from spending lots of time outdoors with his girls, playing baseball, swimming, and letting them take turns pushing his big new power lawnmower.
"Kelly's got a boyfriend!" Mandy started up the sing-song chorus again.
"Daddy, make her stop," Kelly pleaded.
"All right, Mandy, that's enough. Why don't you go help Nellie Mae peel peaches? I hear we're going to have cobbler for dessert."
Mandy instantly disappeared inside, anticipating sugary treats from Nellie Mae in return for a minimal amount of work.
Kelly settled herself on the wide porch railing and leaned back against one of the massive square columns, anxious to tell her story. She always told her daddy everything because he paid very close attention and asked good questions. The young girl had learned to express her ideas from her father and also had learned when to keep quiet, which had maintained her place at breakfast with her father and his friends. He, in turn, shared with Kelly all the information about work, sports, politics and local color that didn't interest her mother.
Clayton waited with a broad grin as his beautiful daughter settled herself on the railing. She could barely contain her excitement.
"Oh, Daddy, Mandy's right! I met the most wonderful boy!"
"Where?"
"On the golf course. His little brother knew Mandy and we met and the way he looked at me, I thought I would die."
"Oh?"
"His eyes are blue, exactly the same shade as yours, and it's like I could see way down inside of him and he's good and honest and pure, besides being just plain nice and so cute you wouldn't believe it."
"And taller than you, I expect," her father added with a smile, knowing that Kelly was self-conscious about being five-six at the age of eleven, afraid she'd eventually be six feet tall.
"Yes, he's taller, but he's nearly thirteen, or so Mandy says."
"Mandy usually knows what she's talking about," he chuckled.
Kelly nodded.
"And does this wonderful boy have a name, or should I ask Mandy?" he teased.
"He has a beautiful name. It's Cameron. Cameron Coulter."
Her father turned to stone and the color drained from his face. Kelly felt a chill, as if the sun had just ducked behind a cloud. She waited for some familiar expression, some look of reassurance, but instead she felt scared and guilty, as if she had just done something terribly wrong, but didn't know what it was. She waited in dreadful silence, searching for a clue.
Finally, her father said softly, "That's Carolina's boy."
Kelly tried to recall meeting anyone named Carolina, but couldn't. Her father seemed to know everyone in Vicksburg and told interesting stories about many of them. Since Kelly was as good at remembering people and names as her mother was good at forgetting them, she thought it strange that this Carolina would be an unfamiliar name. She frowned and waited during the interminable silence that marked the first time Kelly had ever experienced the pain of his apparent disapproval.
"I'm sure he's very nice," her father eventually added. "Carolina is a fine nurse. If I ever got really sick, I'd want someone to call her to take care of me."
Kelly wondered why he would want to call another nurse, since her own mother was an RN, even though she didn't work. That question would have to wait because the expression on her father's face made it clear that the conversation was over.
"Guess I'll go help Nellie Mae," Kelly offered, hoping for a change in her father's mood, but he just stared at her blankly and nodded. When the peach cobbler was finally crusted over and bubbly hot, Kelly's father was still sitting on the porch, lost in his own thoughts, and for the first time in her life, Kelly felt excluded.
On her way home from church the next morning, Kelly resolved to ask her father what exactly she had done wrong. She knew it was important to examine her conscience and confess every sin. She just needed help identifying this one.
Turning her bike into the McCains' driveway, Kelly noticed the newspaper on the front porch. Usually her daddy would be reading it when she returned home from six o'clock Mass. He wasn't in the kitchen, but her mother was.
"Where's Daddy?" Kelly asked without saying 'good morning.'
"He wasn't feeling well and so Mr. Everett took him to the doctor. I didn't want to wake up Mandy."
Or drive the car, Kelly criticized silently, never understanding her mother's irrational fear of driving.
The black hall telephone jangled the air and Regina went to answer it. In less than a minute, she returned to the kitchen.
"Your father's dead," she said flatly. "He had a massive coronary occlusion and expired at six thirty-five at Saint Paul's Hospital."
Kelly stared at her mother in disbelief. The floor where she was standing suddenly gave way and Kelly felt herself falling into a dark hole that went down and down until she was floating in black space with nothing to hold her and nothing to stop the fall.
"What are we going to do now?" Regina asked her daughter, trading roles and looking like a lost child. The sound of her mother's frightened voice stopped her from falling. Kelly forced herself to make the floor solid again and cover up the hole.
"We're going to call the funeral home and do what we have to do," Kelly answered matter-of-factly.
"No! No! Don't tell anybody!" her mother warned. "Don't tell anybody!" Regina abruptly left the kitchen, went up to her bedroom and closed the door.
Kelly stood immobilized, but her mind was racing. Panic gripped her, reminding her of the woman down the street who had been taken to some institution when her husband died. She thought of the orphan children in her Charles Dickens' books and how they lived in squalor and ate gruel. She wanted to grab her sleeping sister and protect her from the people who would come to get them.
She tried to remember anything she ever heard about what to do when somebody dies. They read the Will. Kelly's father had shown her where he kept all his important papers. Now she was glad that he always shared everything with her. She walked quietly up the stairs and down the hallway, past her mother's closed door, to the small office her daddy kept at home, with all the forms for selling real estate and insurance that Kelly knew so well. She didn't allow herself to think that he would never again ask her to separate the white, pink, yellow and blue copies and file them for him, as she had been doing since she learned the alphabet.
Kelly found the small metal box he kept in the bottom of the file cabinet and opened it with the key from the top desk drawer. Along with some envelopes yellowed with age, Kelly found a newer one, sealed, with the words "Last Will and Testament of Clayton John McCain," typed across the front, with the return address of their family lawyer.
Hesitating a moment, trying to convince herself that her daddy couldn't be dead, Kelly finally opened the envelope carefully.
The first two paragraphs were what she would have expected, but then she began the third: "Notwithstanding my children, Franklin Todd, Kelly Marie and Amanda Jane, I hereby…" Kelly stopped. "Franklin Todd?" she whispered, frowning.
Kelly blinked and re-read it: "Notwithstanding my children, Franklin Todd, Kelly Marie, and Amanda Jane…"
How strange, she thought. I must have had a brother who died and nobody told me. Wait. If he had died, he wouldn't be mentioned here. Oh, my God! For the second time, the floor beneath her gave way and she was falling, falling, falling through blackness.
With all the strength she had, Kelly stopped her fall and stood once more on solid ground. She resolved never to feel that helpless fear again and she forced herself to finish reading the Will. Then she sat in her father's chair and waited to hear her mother emerge from the bedroom. She waited as long as she could bear it and then knocked on the door. Although there was no response, she entered the room. Her mother was lying on the bed, curled up like a frightened child. Kelly had never before thought about how tiny her mother was, how delicate her strawberry blond hair.
"Mother," Kelly began softly, but firmly, "I want to know about Franklin Todd."
Regina McCain glanced at Kelly in fear and then hostility, but she didn't move as she answered in an angry whisper, "Your father was married before and he had a son! Don't tell anybody about him and don't ever mention his name to me again!"
Kelly nodded and left the room, closing the door behind her. She went back to her father's office and opened the telephone book, easily finding the "funeral homes" listing in the yellow pages. She recognized the name of one that all the important families in Vicksburg used. Taking a deep breath, she dialed the number.
"Hello, this is Kelly McCain. My daddy, that is, my father, Clayton John McCain, has just died at St. Paul's Hospital. Please send someone to get his body and start doing what you do. I will call you back with further instructions…. Thank you."
Next she called the regional head of the insurance company in Jackson for whom her father sold life insurance, thankful that she knew him and could find his home telephone number.
"Mr. Fletcher, this is Kelly McCain in Vicksburg. My daddy just died and we are going to need some money. Will you please help me fill out the forms, and tell me what I should do next?"
After that, she called the lawyer and the pastor of First Baptist Church where her daddy had taught Sunday School. She knew she should call a priest to come talk to her mother, but both the pastor and the associate were new just this week and hadn't even been to the McCains' house for dinner yet. The eleven-year-old child longed to talk to Father McGillis, but he was spending a month in Ireland before his official transfer to Hattiesburg, which might as well have been Timbuckto. Kelly reluctantly called the rectory and the new priest said he would come after the noon Mass.
