“That’s right. Always known as Muddy. Muddy Wilson. Ever since he was a kid his name was Muddy, somehow short for Martin. I cared a great deal for that man. A very great deal. Turns out I knew him way back at the university, and he was Muddy back then too. So. Muddy taught history at the high school here in town. I taught junior high, but for several years we were in the same building, and I was always glad to walk into the teachers room and see him there.”
Lucy was watching her with expectancy on her face, Olive thought.
Olive continued. “Muddy was a wonderful teacher. Oh, did he love history. And he got the kids to care for it too. You’d see him walking around town with a bunch of his students pointing to this statue and that, he adored the local history—but all history, as far as I could tell. And his students looked up to him, which was no small thing. He had enthusiasm.
“He also had a very pretty wife named Sally. I can’t remember where he picked her up. But they got married young—as people did back then—and had two daughters, one very pretty, the other sort of pretty, but they were both nice girls. Oh.”
Olive held up her finger. “Here’s a detail that matters, cannot believe I almost forgot this. But Muddy’s mother had died when he was young, just a small kid, and he and his father lived alone together. Never heard much about the father, but once in a blue moon Muddy would recall some memory of his mother. Of which—apparently—he had only a few.”
“Good memories?” asked Lucy.
“Oh yes.” Olive paused, nodding her head. “Yes. Always had the feeling that Muddy had loved his mother. Don’t know what she died of, but she did. He was just a small kid, as I said. All right, so Muddy and Sally and the two girls, can’t remember their names, they’ll come to me—”
“Did Sally work?” Lucy asked, tucking her hair behind her ear.
“No. Well, yes. Because in the summer they had a farm.” Olive pointed over her head. “Out past the Larkindale fields is where they lived. It was a small farm, but they lived there, and they farmed it in the summer, and Sally would be out at the vegetable stand selling corn. Did I already say Sally was beautiful? There was something about her.” Olive looked out the window; there were daffodils there, yellow trumpets in the air; one of them had just opened earlier this morning. “How can I put this? Sally had a glow. And the glow made her more than pretty.”
“You mean she looked beatific?” Lucy asked.
Olive turned to look at her. “Explain what you mean by that,” she said.
Lucy uncrossed her legs and then crossed them again—her legs were bare, Olive noticed—the other way and said, “Oh, sometimes a person, it doesn’t have to be a woman, but they just have some sort of natural glow. I met a man years ago who just glowed, he beamed a certain glow, and right after I met him, he got on his motorcycle and was hit by a car. He died. But he had that look. Like he was already on his way to heaven.”
—
This irritated Olive.
She thought the heaven part was stupid, and also—Lucy was spoiling her story. She blew out breath from her mouth. “Anyway, the woman did indeed have a glow. Every second she looked like that. That I ever saw her anyway. She just had that certain thing about her.” Olive paused, swinging her foot up and down. “And then one day Henry and I stopped by the vegetable stand, and we bought some corn, and she was out there working and—”
“She didn’t have the glow?” Lucy asked.
“Different than that.” Olive was squinting, remembering this. “She looked kind of yellow. She’d always had dyed blond hair, and she still did that day, but as we drove away I said to Henry, She looked wrong, she looked yellow.”
“Did Henry see this too?”
“Can’t remember, to be honest. Anyway.” Olive looked out the window again and then back at Lucy. “Within six months she was dead. Liver cancer.”
“Oh God,” Lucy said. “How old was she?”
“Probably early forties. The oldest girl had just gone off to college. So Sally died. And—”—Olive held up her finger, pointing it to the ceiling—“—the point is this: Muddy fell apart. Became a different person.”
“Tell me how,” Lucy said, and Olive said, “Hold on, I’m going to.”
Olive swung her foot again, rather vigorously, and then she put both her feet together on the floor. “Muddy grew a beard, he grew his hair long, he wore floppy leather sandals even in the winter. Back then the hippie movement was starting, and he looked like that. Like a hippie. Only he was too old to be a hippie.”
“Oh God, this is going to be an awful story,” Lucy said.
“Gets worse.” Olive gave a nod toward Lucy. “So Muddy starts to look like hell. And there was a girl in the school, her name was Marion Tiltingham. I’d had her a few years earlier and she was crazy. Just a nut. She also had a glow, but hers was a nutty glow. Went through a phase of thinking she was a witch, that sort of thing. I remember hearing that she and a boy at school locked themselves in a dark closet one day to see which one would go crazy faster.”
“Which one did?” Lucy asked.
“Who knows. So, this Marion Tiltingham graduated from high school that year that Sally died, she was eighteen years old, and the next thing we knew she had moved in with Muddy as his housekeeper.” Olive raised her hands and made little quote marks with her fingers as she said the word housekeeper. “That’s what they both said for a while, that she was his housekeeper, but of course she wasn’t. She was sleeping with him.”
“How do you know that?”
“Oh—everyone figured it out after a while, but one day Henry and I stopped by Muddy’s house and she walked right out of the bedroom, which was downstairs, and she looked all sleepy and we saw it immediately. Anyway, so Muddy had fallen very much in love with her. She was about the age of his oldest daughter, and of course the girls naturally hated her, but I don’t remember either of them acting out or anything. I think they very much loved their father. But how hellish for them. So the nut Marion—well, after three years, when Marion was twenty-one, she ran off with some young man she met who worked at the small grocery store that was in town back then. Out there near the Larkindale fields. And Muddy was devastated. As he’d been with Sally’s death. He stopped bathing, never smiled, looked like absolute hell, and within a year he had married a woman who had four little kids of her own, and they all moved in with Muddy, and that lasted about a year. No idea what happened. She was a very unpleasant person, that woman, I had known her years earlier when she was quite young, and she was just cold. Meanwhile, Muddy’s teaching was going downhill, he didn’t care about it anymore. Horrible thing to watch. Flopping around in those leather sandals with long dirty toenails, awful.
“Then he married another woman, she was slightly more age-appropriate, and that lasted about three years. At this point the high school had been built and so I didn’t see Muddy as much, but we’d have him over to dinner, and so strangely this wife never came with him, and he’d just sit there, and talk about nothing, you know—”
Olive seemed to be losing steam. “Finally, we heard that they were divorced, and he went off to California to get some kind of doctorate or something, both his girls were long out of the house by then, and while he was in California, he married yet another woman. I met her. He brought her back to Crosby and they showed up at the house, and this poor woman was so dumpy, his age—finally—
“The point is that Muddy,” Olive said, with a huge sigh, “the point is that Muddy was a mess. Still a mess. And then he died.”
“How?” Lucy asked. She leaned forward slightly as she asked this.
“He got some kind of cancer and he refused to be treated for it. He wrote me a letter about that, and he said, ‘I always loved you.’ ”
Olive blinked her eyes. This was painful for her. She had really liked Muddy.
—
The two women sat in silence as though absorbing all that had just been said. Finally, Lucy spoke. “So what’s interesting about this is that Muddy was completely dependent on Sally. She made him who he was. And for five minutes he transferred that onto that Marion girl, but it couldn’t last.”
Olive nodded. “That’s right. And I think—I could be wrong—that because he had lost his mother so young, he loved Sally with all the love not just of a husband but of a son as well, and when he lost her he got thrown back to that bad thing that happened to him as a little boy, and he could not cope. Could not do it.”
“I think you’re right about that, I agree,” Lucy said.
Another silence stayed in the room, and then Olive said, “She was his linchpin. He used that word once, as she was dying. Said Sally was his linchpin.”
