course. Everyone knew. Her father, Old Man Byrd, had been the county judge for forty years. After retirement, he became a hermit—or as close to a hermit as it was possible to be in Lewisville, which was chock-full of neighborly curious people naturally bound and determined to look after one another all the time. (“I swear to God,” my father remarked once in exasperation, “if the devil himself moved into this town, I guess you’d take him a casserole, too!”) Judge Byrd was a wild-looking, white-haired, ugly old man whose eyebrows grew all the way across his face in the most alarming fashion; he walked bent over, leaning on a walking stick topped by a carved ivory skull, yelling at children. He smelled bad. He did not socialize. He did not go to church, and was rumored to be an atheist. When he died, everyone was shocked to learn that there would be no funeral, unheard of in our town. Furthermore, he was to be cremated.
I remember the conversation Mama and Daddy had about it at the time.
“Cremated …” Mama mused. “Isn’t that sort of … communist? Don’t they do it in Russia and places like that?”
“Lord, no, honey.” Daddy was laughing. “It’s perfectly common, in this country as well as abroad. For one thing, it’s a lot more economical.”
“Well, it certainly isn’t southern,” Mama sniffed. “And I certainly don’t intend to have it done to me. Are you listening, John? I want my body to remain as intact as possible, and I want to be buried with all my rings on. And a nice suit, or maybe a dress with a little matching jacket. And I want lots of yellow roses, as in life.”
“Yes, Billie.” Daddy hid a smile as he went out the door. He was Old Man Byrd’s lawyer, and so was in charge of the arrangements. I couldn’t believe my own daddy was actually getting to go inside Old Man Byrd’s house, a vine-covered mansion outside town, which everyone called “The Ivy House.” But of course my father was the best lawyer in town, so it followed that he’d be the judge’s lawyer, too. And since he was the soul of discretion, it also followed that he’d never mentioned this to us, not even when my cousin Jinx and I got caught trying to peep in Old Man Byrd’s windows on a dare. I still remember what we saw: a gloomy sitting room full of dark, crouching furniture; a fat white cat on a chair; the housekeeper’s sudden furious face.
Jinx and I were grounded from our bikes for a whole week, during which I completed a paint-by-numbers version of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, done mostly in shades of orange and gold, and presented it to my daddy, who seemed surprised.
“I’m sorry for trespassing,” I said. “I’ll never do it again.”
But I wasn’t sorry, not in the least. The incident marked the beginning of my secret career.
I lived to spy, and this was mainly what I did on my bike trips around town. I’d seen some really neat stuff, too. For instance, I had seen Roger Ainsley, the coolest guy in our school, squeezing pimples in his bathroom mirror. I’d seen Mr. Bondurant whip his big son Earl with a belt a lot harder than anybody ever ought to, and later, when Earl dropped out of school and enlisted in the Army, I alone knew why. I had seen my fourth-grade teacher, prissy Miss Emily Horn, necking on the couch with her boyfriend and smoking cigarettes. Best of all, I had seen Mrs. Cecil Hertz come running past a picture window wearing nothing but an apron, followed shortly by Mr. Cecil Hertz himself, wearing nothing at all and carrying a spatula.
It was amazing how careless people were about drawing their drapes and pulling their shades down. It was amazing what you could see, especially if you were an athletic and enterprising girl such as myself. I wrote my observations down in a Davy Crockett spiral notebook I’d bought for this purpose. I wrote down everything: date, time, weather, physical descriptions, my reaction. I would use this stuff later, in my novels.
I saw Carroll Byrd the very first time I rode out there to spy on her, after the old man’s death. It was a cold gray day in January, and she was burning trash. The sky was so dark that I didn’t notice the smoke at first, not until I was halfway down the long lane that went from the road to the house—her house, now. In spite of the cold, she had opened the windows, flung the shutters outward, and left the front door wide open, too. Airing everything out, I guessed. The whole house wore a rattled, astonished expression. She had a regular bonfire going on the patio in the side yard—cardboard boxes, newspapers, old magazines. She emerged from the house with armful after armful of old papers to feed the yellow flames.
I had ditched my bike earlier, up the lane; now I dodged behind giant boxwoods, getting closer and closer. This was interesting. Neither my mother nor any of her friends would ever have acted like Carroll Byrd. In the first place, they all had constant help and never lifted a finger carrying anything. In the second place, Mama “would not be found dead” dressed the way Carroll Byrd was dressed that day: she wore work boots, just like a field hand; men’s pants belted at the waist; and a tight, long-sleeved black sweater (leotard was a word I would not learn until college). Her dark hair, longer than any woman’s in town, was pulled back severely from her high forehead and tied with a string, and fell straight down her back. Indian hair, streaked with gray. I knew instinctively that she didn’t care about the gray, that she would never color it. Nor would she ever wear makeup. Her face was lean and hard, her cheekbones chiseled. She had inherited her father’s heavy brows, like dark wings about the deep-set black eyes.
While I watched, she paused in the middle of one of her trips to the house, and my heart leaped up to my throat as I thought that I had been discovered. But no. Carroll Byrd had stopped to eye an ornate white trellis, nonfunctional but pretty, which arched over the path between the house and the patio. Hand on hip, she considered it. She walked around it. Then, before I could believe what she was doing, she ripped it out of the ground and was breaking it up like so many match-sticks, throwing the pieces into the fire. Red flames shot toward the lowering sky. She laughed out loud. I noted her generous mouth, the flash of white teeth.
Then Carroll Byrd sat down on an iron bench to watch her fire burn for a while. She lit a cigarette, striking the match on her boot. Now I noticed that she wasn’t wearing a brassiere, something I had read about but never seen done among “nice” women. When she leaned over to stub out her cigarette on the patio tiles, I saw her breasts shift beneath the black sweater. Immediately I thought of “Selena’s brown nipples” on page 72 in Jinx’s and my dog-eared, hidden copy of Peyton Place. I was both disgusted and thrilled.
There in the cramped and pungent safety of the giant boxwood bush, I fell in love. We watched her fire, the two of us from our different vantage points, until it burned itself out. She ran a hose on the ashes before she went inside her father’s house and shut the door.
I sneaked back to my bike and rode down the long lane and then home, pedaling as fast as I could, freezing to death. But my own house seemed too warm, too bright, too soft—now I hated the baby-blue shag rug in my room, hated all my stuffed animals. I wanted fire and bare trees and cold gray sky. I went straight to bed and wouldn’t get up for dinner. After a while, Mama came in and took my temperature (normal) and brought me a bowl of milk toast on a tray. This was what you got in our house when you were sick, and it was delicious.
MAMA WAS A great cook. She also loved to talk on the phone, and during the next weeks, I strained to overhear any mention of Carroll Byrd. I got plenty of material. But since Mama generally stayed home and was the recipient rather than the purveyor of news, it was sometimes hard for me to figure out what had actually happened.
“She what?”
“You’re kidding! Why, those rugs are worth a fortune! That furniture came from England!”
“Oh, he did not!”
“Well, that is the strangest thing I have ever heard in my whole life. The strangest!”
“You’re kidding!”
Et cetera.
I had to decipher the news: Carroll Byrd had given away the downstairs furnishings and the Oriental rugs to several distant relations, who showed up in U-Hauls to claim them and cart them away. Then she fired the housekeeper. She hired Norman Estep, a local ne’er-do-well and jack-of-all-trades,