“There’s this William Goldman novel
called The Princess Bride, it came
out about ten or twelve years ago. Anyway, there’s this passage about how
crying, in terms of emotions, is always worse than you think it’ll be, but in
terms of the clock, it never lasts forever. That’s pretty much about right,
seems like.”
That’s
what part of the letter said. It wasn’t signed, or ever even mailed; instead
had been tucked away in a box that we found tucked away in the rent house’s
garage. We were clearing things out to get the place livable again; the
previous guy, Greg, had committed suicide a couple months earlier. Things were
a little tight without that extra income, and tension was high.
The box was full of Sports
Illustrated magazines and Spider-Man and Alpha Flight comics from the early
80’s. Mikayla was curious, but not just about the comics. “What happened to
this guy? Why did he write the letter?”
I shrugged. “He felt stupid?”
She gave me One of Those Female Looks. From your sister,
that’s acceptable, but still annoying. “That’s not good enough.”
“Well?” Don’t know why I even asked that…we both knew what
our next step was.
“Yeah!” There was a story buried somewhere, and, to take a
line from Tony Stark in The Avengers, we
had a plan: To attack it. It was an instinct that Mom and Dad
had drilled into us over the years; Dad with his nonfiction and Mom with our
schooling. We’re homeschooled, juniors right now, and for English she’d make me
and Mikayla research and fictionalize historical events. It had kind of become
a habit by now.
We tracked Dad down from where he’d been dismantling
half-rotted sawhorses heading for the burn pit. “We found somethin’.”
“Like mice? Copperheads? Black widows?” he asked.
“Not so far yet. This letter.” I said.
“You know y’all shouldn’t read other people’s mail, Tate,”
he said.
“Sure, we know that. But it’s our nature to snoop, so…”
Mikayla shrugged, grinning.
He grunted. “Let me see.” He read for a bit, started to open
his mouth, then shook his head. “Yeah….wow. Hadn’t thought about this in a
while.”
“You knew the guy who wrote it?” she asked.
“Course. Greg and I grew up together, went to high school
together. That’s why he was renting the house.”
“That was Greg’s handwriting?” I asked.
“Yeah. You didn’t recognize it?”
Mikayla shook her head, blondish ponytail whipping her in
the face.
“Huh…” Dad stacked the dissected sawhorse parts into a
less-trippable pile. “Guess handwriting could
change over time…”
“And his never was the best.” I pointed out.
“Well….what happened to him?” she asked again.
“You know what happened,” he said, quiet.
“Yeah, but that’s not the question…”
“No, she meant, what happened then, what that letter was about.” I said.
Dad nodded comprehendingly and kind of sighed. “Let’s try to
finish clearing out most of today’s junk, and then I’ll tell you guys. You’ll
probably go and badger everyone until you know every last detail, but…it would make some good story material.”
“Okay. Here’s the deal.” Dad began his story while we were
walking down Grand Avenue just past Morgan’s Bakery. “We were in college, most
of us, and Greg was dating this girl named Lisa. He was here in Tahlequah, and
she was in Springfield at Southwest Missouri State. His grandparents were best
friends with her parents, so that’s how they met, I guess. Anyway, the wedding
was in Carthage, and he’d wanted me to be his best man.
“The wedding was outside, at some relatives’ farm, it was
during one of those cold snaps winding up winter during spring break.” We were
passing Sam & Ella’s Specialty Pizza by now, just coming up the fountain
announcing the Northeastern State campus. It was one of those cloudy, cold late
October days. “It started out pretty well, but everyone’s jackets and dresses
were flying all over the place cause of the wind. That almost got really bad a
couple times.”
Mikayla and I exchanged a look, agreeing that we could’ve
done without that information.
“Then, uh – it didn’t work out.”
He fell silent as we walked past Seminary Hall, across the
street, by the NSU bookstore and up the stairs to Flo’s coffee shop. Students
came here often; if either of us stuck around town once we got out of high
school next year, we’d probably spend a lot of time here, too.
We exchanged glances again. “What do you mean?”
“There wasn’t a wedding,” Dad stated.
“Why not?”
“She left with some other guy halfway through the ceremony.”
He looked irritated and uncomfortable. “What do you guys want to order?”
We ordered our drinks at the same time, then did a double
take. “Wait...what?” “She left with some other guy?”
“Yup. Sure did. It was a really strange experience.”
Sounded like it…
“You guys’re the kids that write stuff for school, aren’t
ya? Like, novels or something?” That was how the elderly man we were
interviewing greeted us at the nursing home.
“Yep, that’s us.” I said. “Historical fiction, mostly.”
Mikayla added.
“And your dad said you’re researching a new story.” Mr.
Johnson said.
“Yes sir, that’s right.”
“How can I help?”
I tried to explain with what information we had. “Dad said
you were a preacher around there, so we were wondering…” This was why I hated
interviewing people. I always got so tongue-tied.
The old man chuckled and smiled slightly. “Right. Yeh, I
know what you’re talking about. That time the bride ran off with the service
half over.”
“Yep!”
“Well, Lisa’s folks were part of Calvary, and so whenever
she was in town she’d attend; we all kind of watched her grow up, kep’ an eye
on her. There was this boy name of Grant Chapman; they went around together
some. Lisa was….” He shook his head. “She was always a little out of the mold,
I guess you might say. That never seemed that big a deal, but maybe it was.
None of us knew this boy, Greg, she was set to marry, but if Lisa saw somethin’
in him, he was like as not all right.”
We nodded politely.
“You guys ever had anything published?” he asked.
“…Not yet.” “Still working on it.”
“Well, there we were, it was out at the Wright’s farm, and
the cold was terrible. It was one of those days where the weather doesn’t ever
really make up its mind. I was about at the ‘Speak up now or keep quiet’ bit,
when this boy Grant gets up. Things got real quiet all of a sudden.
“He says, ‘’Scuse me, but you’re gonna have to hold on a
minute.’ Her daddy says why come? ‘Cause she’s fixing to make a huge mistake.
This guy, he ain’t gonna be right. They don’t fit together.’ There’s a
commotion, lots of folks talkin’ at once.
“Lisa speaks up, says she’s sorry for all the expense and
everybody comin’ out that day, but he was right, and she’d changed her mind.
She mentioned some book she thought the situation was like. Don’t remember what
it was.”
“The Princess Bride?
The Great Gatsby?” Mikayla asked. She’s
quick to make those connections. It took me a minute to figure it out, but she
meant Daisy Buchanan’s behavior just before her wedding in Gatsby, and the faked forced marriage between Humperdinck and
Buttercup.
“Might be,” Mr. Johnson nodded uncertainly. “Her cousin
Cindy, she was the maid of honor, tried to keep her from leaving, but she
shoved her away and walked off along into the house.
“After that, things were kinda a blur. Funny thing, though;
your dad tried to say something, keep things along the tracks, but that boy
Greg, he didn’t say anything, that I can remember.”
“…Huh. Well, we sure do appreciate you letting us ask you
about it.” “Yeah, thanks so much.”
“Your dad never told ya about this?”
“Not much, until just recently.”
“Well, that’s somethin’ else. Figured he’d’ve written about
it someway or other.”
We started out the door, he was still talking to himself.
“Maybe things worked out over if it’d gone on…Grant was a local boy, he turned
out decent. Nobody really mentions it much exceptin’ in whispers. And there was
a leetle bit of relief, I know I felt, that it didn’t turn out.”
“If this story has so much scope for imagination, then why
didn’t you write it?” Mikayla asked. They were throwing a Frisbee around in the
yard.
“Sometimes….” Dad started to answer. “There’s always gonna
be a handful of stories that you’re too close to. They might, probably would,
be the best material you could have to work with, but you can’t write those
down.”
She asked why not.
“Because….it’s too personal. Too painful. And it isn’t
fair.”
“Why not?”
Dad stared at the disc for a while, almost like he was
x-raying it. “Because…I guess I still don’t understand what happened,” he
mumbled. “And watching the slow fallout…knowing that I did all I knew…but it
wasn’t… It hurts too much.”
“That makes sense, I guess,” Mikayla said after a pause.
“And besides, Lisa’s probably still alive. Nobody really
knows, she disappeared, but that’s another reason I never tried writing
anything about it.”
Mikayla launched the Frisbee with an underhanded “newspaper
throw”, which is basically the same motion used in skipping rocks. We’ve come
close to beheading people before with that throw; it will reach its target
really fast, but it’s not the easiest to control. Good for venting your
emotions.
Dad jumped to catch a ricochet off the oak tree; he got a
hand on the disc but couldn’t quite bring it down.
“I can message Cindy through Facebook, see if she could
help.”
“That’d be great! Tate and I have a campus tour set next
week, maybe it could be then.”
After a thorough exploration of Missouri Southern State
University in Joplin, we headed up to Carthage for an interview and some more
digging. The folks at the Carthage Press office
were very friendly and helpful; showing me where the ‘morgue’ was and allowing
me to hunt through old copies. My fingers got pretty covered with newsprint
ink, but I found two articles about the wedding; one from two days after it
happened, and the other from a couple months later in May 1986. Mikayla stopped
by a homeless shelter we’d been volunteering with on occasion for the past
couple years to check up on a couple former residents.
The interview was with a lady named Cindy Brennan; she was
the cousin/maid of honor that Mr. Johnson had mentioned. It was at a Hardee’s,
since that was supposed to be easy to find.
“Hi! You guys must be Tate and Mikayla Smith? I’m Cindy.
Nice to meet ya!”
I tried to smile.
“Nice to meet you, too,” Mikayla greeted smoothly.
“So you’re trying to figure out what happened at Lisa’s
wedding way back when, that’s what Wade said on Facebook.”
“Right.” I nodded.
“So whatcha looking for, exactly?”
“Well…we were kinda trying to maybe turn it into a novel. We
sometimes write stuff together like that,” said Mikayla. “Anyway, we’ve talked
to Dad and the preacher, and gone through the newspapers, but what I don’t
really understand is why she left.”
“And so you thought I might know.” Cindy nodded slowly.
“Something like that, yeah.”
“Gosh…I haven’t heard from Lisa in years. It’s like she
disappeared off the face of the Earth. Anyway, but yeah, I could try. Shoot.”
“Okay…well, you were the maid of honor, so I guess you were
pretty close?”
“Totally! Kind of like sisters. She’d been dating this guy,
Grant, but they broke up just before she started college. I was down in
Fayetteville at U of A, a year older than her. I wasn’t too unhappy that they broke up;
I’d always kind of had a crush on him from sixth grade. Funny how you remember
things like that. Anyway, Lisa started going out with this guy named Greg from
Oklahoma; I didn’t know him that well, but he seemed like a good guy. Kinda
strange, though.”
“So, what happened?”
“Well…Grant stood up in the middle of the ceremony;
everybody was pretty horrified. You’ve heard that Taylor Swift song ‘Speak
Now’?”
We grinned.
“Well, it was just exactly like that. Everybody was talking
at once, it seemed like, this dude Greg looked like he was gonna faint. I tried
to hang on to Lisa’s arm, tellin’ her that this was ridiculous and just keep
going with the service, but she shoved me away and stalked off towards the
barn. There was a lot going on after that; the reception was pretty much
ruined. She slipped away after that at some point; quit school after that
semester once freshman year ended, and the last I heard from her she was going
to Memphis.”
“With Grant?”
“No….they were together, sort of, for a couple months late
that summer, but…nah.” She shook her head. “We all kinda hoped that maybe they’d
stick together, at least, but…she was gone by then.”
Interviews are a necessary evil in researching, I thought as
we pulled off I-44 onto 82, passing the hilly pastures that meant we were
almost home. Mikayla’s phone rang. “It’s Toby.” She flipped it onto speaker
mode.
“Yo, what’s up?”
“Hey guys, how’d your trip go?”
“All right. We looked at another school, hunted through dark
cobwebby rooms, and got a decently-useful interview,” I said.
“And Tate was asked out on a date by a waitress.”
“Sounds productive,” he said. “Mom’s wondering if y’all are
almost home.”
“Yep, passing the Log Store now.”
“Awesome. She needs some Nutella and graham crackers from
the store. And there’s an order needs to be picked up at Pizza Hut.”
“We’re on it,” Mikayla said, nodding. “Later, dude.”
She hung up, then looked at me.
“You totally should have gotten her number...”
The Westville Reporter
contained many references to Greg and the mysterious event of his past in
local news columns(which in reality are really just entertaining gossip written
by old people), as evidenced by numerous appearances in its pages over the late
80’s/early 90’s. It was terrible as
far as journalistic quality went; but as an example of small-town journalism,
the newspaper has always been a masterpiece. Opinions ran rampant across the
articles, and the police blotter featured such important notices as “Officer
Jones was directed to the Kwik Stop to check on a suspicious person trying to
enter the building at 5:37 a.m. It turned out to be the donut delivery guy.”
Everybody had an opinion on Greg’s past and they all
frequently shared it, and for whatever reason, he’d kept most of the copies
featuring articles where he was mentioned. That didn’t help much in finding out
any more real concrete information, but certainly helped the local-color angle
of this story. And besides, it was hysterical. Westville is a good town, but
things definitely run differently there. Most social conventions don’t really
apply; especially not when it comes to privacy.
“So…to recap…” I folded the last copy and set it back in the
box of stuff from Greg’s garage. “’A: A guy moves into town. 2: He has no
job…’” “’And C: He wants to marry Mrs. Brendlemight!’” Mikayla finished the Andy Griffith quote.
“Seriously, how did he make a living?” I wondered.
“Bought cotton, probably.” She didn’t mean actual cotton
harvesting – the jobs in Westville are all either at the Baldor plant or
running chicken farms – but it was a To
Kill a Mockingbird reference, as in Maycomb “buying cotton” was “a polite
term for doing nothing.”
“Maybe he did random handyman jobs or something,” I
shrugged. “Maybe I could get Dad to talk some about him.”
“Sounds worth a shot.”
With Christmas and New Year’s and everything, there wasn’t
much to keep up with hunting this story down. Besides, there was the SAT to
study for. The boxes of stuff sat in a corner of Mikayla’s bedroom for about a
month before we hauled them onto the kitchen table on a Tuesday evening in
early February. We did look through some of the magazines to see how ads had
changed, and tried to read some of the comic books, but that felt weird,
looking through a dead guy’s things. Those got tossed into the burn barrel
pretty quickly.
“So, here’s what we know,” she said while flipping open a
notebook. “Lisa was kind of out-there at times, but just about everybody liked
her. Greg was a little weird, honestly.”
“Seriously, out of everybody Marvel had stories to follow,
he followed Alpha Flight?” I shook my head. “The X-Men would’ve been bad
enough, but the Canadian Avengers?”
“Anyway, they get engaged and all set for the wedding at her
aunt’s, and this dude Grant Chapman comes up; Lisa leaves for the barn and
disappears!”
“Then a couple weeks later she’s back for a bit with Grant,
and then last we know she dropped out of school and headed for Memphis.” I
added, organizing the copied clippings.
“Did you think something was weird about the way Cindy
talked about that?”
I thought a minute. “Kinda…if they were that close,
then…how…?”
“Right.” She nodded, picking up one and messing up my neat
stack. “There was definitely stuff she wasn’t tellin’ us.”
“Well…it’s not like we’re the police, Kayla. Can’t just force folks to tell us everything about
their lives.”
“I know, I know…”
“Anyway.” I nodded at the pile of stuff.
“Then Greg slunk down to Westville, buyin’ cotton, then a
couple years later when Desert Storm hit he joined the Army. They said once he
got out, he had PTSD on top of the depression an’ everythin’.”
“And the old ladies kept updates pretty often.”
“Of course they did; can you imagine a Westville without gossip?”
“Really…no. That would be horrifying.”
“So they thought he didn’t ever really get over it. I mean,
that letter was pretty much proof.”
Going from what Dad said, Greg was a huge fan of The Princess
Bride, but in almost a scary way; sometimes inserting himself into the
book’s plot or making up elaborate expansions on characters’ lives. And not
many people knew of the book then, it was before the movie, so it really didn’t
ease folks’ minds (or change their opinions) about him. He was also really paranoid and jumpy, and if he was
any of the novel’s characters, he was Buttercup’s father: There wasn’t really
much in this world that he excelled at. When the wedding was called off; not
only did he feel betrayed by Lisa, but he then felt that pain over again as the
narrator and Westley, along with the anger of Inigo, the outcast nature of
Fezzik, and the bitterness of Miracle Max. It felt to him like going through
Count Rugen’s Machine.
“And then in July he was found, yeah.” I said. It was an
overdose of pills combined with alcohol, his heart rate went haywire.
Mikayla scrutinized her fingernails, nibbling on one. I
folded a gum wrapper twelve times into a tiny square.
“You remember what I told ya Dad said about chasing this?”
I nodded.
“Maybe he was right... Would it be fair for us to track?”
she continued.
“We’d change the names.”
“But the actual event itself…” she shook her head.
“We’ve worked an awful long time trying to track this.”
“I know….” Mikayla sighed. “I just keep thinking of what
William Goldman wrote, that life isn’t fair. Sure, it sucked that Lisa left
Greg in the ditch, and then that he couldn’t ever really get through it, but
Dad has a point, too. Maybe we shouldn’t
do anything with this. Maybe she’s still out there somewhere; it might bring up
bad memories and stuff. And Dad and Cindy both were still really upset about it, and it’s been almost thirty years
ago.”
“I don’t know….I don’t know.” I thought out loud.
Mikayla checked her watch. “It’s almost seven. Time for a
new episode!”
Cue a race to claim the best spot on the couch or the living
room’s good chair while the TV was flipped over to channel 8 for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. We’re a family
with pretty much the same tastes in movies and TV: Character-driven action
shows with a large dose of sarcasm in the face of danger. Thus our love of
superheroes, MacGyver or Firefly, stuff like that. And also
comedies like Full House or Parks and Recreation.
“Maybe he’s right.” Mikayla said afterwards.
“Who? Dad? Coulson?”
She just nodded, once. “Like Coulson was tellin’ Skye a
couple episodes ago, some secrets are meant to stay secrets, remember?”
We stared for a while at the piles of clippings we’d
gathered on this story. She chewed on some cinnamon toast and raised her
eyebrows. I swallowed, thinking. “…Yeah.”
I gathered up the stuff and dumped it into the kitchen trash
can.
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