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Overview
Lost innocence. Betrayal. Smalltown secrets.
It all adds up to necessary lies.
It always starts with the loss of innocence.
Life had plenty to offer beautiful seventeen-year-old Cliffie Flowers in 1953 backwoods Georgia before she got pregnant by a local lothario whose conquests also included her sister. Fearing the disappointment of her adoring father, Cliffie lies to conceal her downfall as the golden girl who might have been the hope of her poor family. But her deception leads to far worse trouble.
Janice Daugharty's 1997 novel, EARL IN THE YELLOW SHIRT (HarperCollins) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. She is the author of seven acclaimed novels and two short story collections. She serves as writer-in-residence at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia. Visit the author at JaniceDaugharty.com
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781611943320 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | BelleBooks |
| Publication date: | 01/31/2014 |
| Pages: | 144 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.40(d) |
Read an Excerpt
One of the last to leave stopped at the door and shook the preacher's hand, going on about the sermon in a familiar wheedling tone, and Brother Leroy's cautious laugh wended back into the sanctuary, relief telling in the sound of a sigh. Then wearily he strolled toward the pulpit and, spying Cliffie, seemed surprised, but said only, "Cliffie!," head hung as in a recapitulation of believing that the long Sunday had ceased. He stopped at the altar and stared at her.
Shambling out between pews, she blurted, "I'm gonna have a baby," and watched for shock to register on his mercurial face. "Roy Harris's," she added. "He don't want to get married." She'd waited so long—it seemed years—for a way out to ripen with time, and now that her secret was said, she felt sapped.
Leaning against the altar table, Brother Leroy shrank, whole body, like somebody dead whose soul is withdrawing with his breath. "Why, Cliffie!" he said in that detached squeak of a voice, always used when, even knowing better, he hoped to stave off a full confession, as though in not knowing all he might be spared, being not God but man and ultimately without that power they all believed him to possess.
She waited with him while his blue eyes glazed over and he thought her news through, or maybe banked it by the numerous possibilities adrift in that unsullied holy mind where sins-of-others came and went and scarred: none of his, theirs, his cross. Like a dead man, waxen and bloodless, he seemed to tally up those possibilities and the futility of it all, to dredge deep for strength and answers, and finding none, reached back, as though with the hand of another—a hand not at all accustomed to dippinginto the collection plate (he always insisted that one of the deacons collect the money, as he always insisted that each sister and brother confess to God instead of the preacher)—and took from the offering a couple of bills, which somehow ended up a ten and a five.
He stared at the bouquet of bills and appeared to be vowing not to think, but to act—alone, without God present—and handed it to Cliffie. Then bending, blue shirt brightening in a print of angel wings across his sweaty shoulder blades, he tore a scrap of paper from a sack of new red potatoes, an alternative offering. Nervously, he flattened the scrap on the table and scribbled, then passed it on to Cliffie too.
"Go to her," he said, tapping the paper with his pen. "You can walk there, Cliffie—back behind the schoolhouse in the quarters. Go to her, first thing." He talked through his teeth and shuddered, holy-wan face alight with wonder at himself, and seemed to steel against an inner quaking from the Lord. "Oh, Lord, have mercy on us all!" He gazed up at the ceiling, where the old lanterns shed a heavenly white light on it all: the situation and possibilities, the weak human condition that spells itself in sin. "She'll take care of you."
All the time Cliffie had been standing there she'd been waiting for a solution and thought at first that he meant her to go to a doctor. But on the scrap of paper sack she read the name "Witch Seymour." Cliffie had heard of the Negro woman who'd earned the name "Witch" for her potions, which usually worked, but if they failed, she went in there. That's how the tobacco hands had put it, telling of Clorox dosing and douching, and as a last resort, a coat hanger.
Hot bile rising in her throat, Cliffie pinned the preacher with her eyes. She'd believed that surely, if he didn't fix things, he might offer some advice, as her Sunday-school book said. If not a miracle, anything but filching from the collection plate—an abomination—and offering the name of a butcher. She wadded the bills with the paper scrap and hurled it at his feet.
From the front stoop, she canvassed the open church grounds, where children spirited like untold demons in the dusk and grown-ups formed into puddlelike shadows, the smell of night coming thick and tart from the pine woods. She always hated that feeling of having been there before, of having looked out on the same scene a thousand and one Sundays, and to her absolute horror, this time she didn't. This time stood out. Time stopped.
Oh, God, she'd told Brother Leroy! Had she really expected him to make Roy Harris marry her, maybe ease the news to Pappy Ocain, who was so down on the daddy of her baby? She picked out Pappy Ocain and Maude, talking with another couple beneath the black gum tree by the pumphouse, then crept down the doorsteps. Forcing each step through on locked quivering knees, she kept her eyes on Pappy Ocain's battered green pickup. It was parked on the grass shoulder of the dirt lane that led from the woods road to the church. She didn't know how she'd make it that far, weak as she was, but the truck looked like home, a place to go inside and get it all back together again, but also like Pappy Ocain, tilted, wronged. His truck.
Yesterday, she'd discovered that she had outgrown them both. Following a two-day rain that burgeoned the creeks and ditches, she had gone out riding the dirt roads with Pappy Ocain, checking for fish, for places to set out his wire baskets. A long day in the tobacco-fumed truck, lost in her thoughts, with him eying her between stops in the dead flatwoods springing to life with reddening maples and greening gums. He seemed to know, but what he knew was not what she knew, the real reason behind why she could no longer go out riding with him the way she used to. "What say we go on back to the house?" he'd said. "Big girl like you mought wanta be listening to the radio." Then he turned on the radio to crackling static and kept riding as if to show her he knew what he didn't know, what would change them forever when he did.
Night lights flickered on, beaming down from each corner of the church eaves, and glanced off the bug-frosted windshield of the truck, blinding the inside. Good—she could faint in private, if indeed she was about to faint. The ringing of locusts loaded the air, and her ears felt stopped up.
While tipping toward the truck, she listened hard to the burble of odd talk from groups about the yard to hear if anybody had noticed her. For balance, she focused on the grille of the truck, where a dead bird was bradded to the metal grid. Stiff, its wings molded to the surface, tiny round head backflung, resisting, beak and eyes rimmed a sour blue. The finest down under the black feathers trembled in the warm air. It smelled faintly of the first stages of rot, warm and milk-ripe, not yet foul but vulnerable.
Suddenly, she felt overcome with the need to cry, a warm fluid rush in her chest that gathered in her face. Poor bird! Poor baby! Poor Cliffie! She could look for that hypocrite preacher to march straight from the church and tell Pappy Ocain any minute now. She eased the truck door open and slid in and closed it with only a snib of the latch. A thin whine of mosquitoes wreathed her head, so she rolled up the window to keep more from collecting and to filter the siren of brats swooping from the dark cemetery behind the church to the lit sand of the front yard.
Cliffie hoped they'd play a long time; she hoped Pappy Ocain and Maude would talk a long time. Give her bleeding heart time to clot. Tears sprang to her eyeballs and just as quickly drained behind them. She had adopted that trick out of necessity; she had no privacy, and if anyone in her family should catch her crying, they wouldn't let up till they learned what was wrong. All of it.
Resting her head against the cool window glass, she watched Pappy Ocain shift feebly in the gutted shadows of the black gum. "Ain't the skeeters bad this evening?" he said and slapped his arm, hand raking down. His full-legged khakis made his frail legs look sturdy. But his white shins were sharp as a bar of whittled lye; Cliffie had seen them in summer when he sat on the porch with his pants legs rolled.
Would he kill Roy Harris? She tucked a foot beneath her and groaned. She didn't know. She had grown up disbelieving the rumor about Pappy Ocain's shooting off his own finger—his trigger finger—to keep from killing again after he got saved. It was something she lived with, the rumor, that he didn't know she knew. At times she did wonder about the rumor, having gone beyond that stage when she found the anomaly of that hand fascinating rather than freakish. She used to sit beside him on the porch and play with that stump of finger, a pinkish shirr of skin, that same finger she had held to when he would walk her up the lane from the house to Cornerville to show her off at the post office or the store.
What People are Saying About This
"There are scenes of remarkable power in ('Necessary Lies'), and a clear and fine novelistic vision."
"I read 'Necessary Lies' by Janice Daugharty and she is a natural-born writer, one of those Georgia women like O'Connor, McCullers, or Siddons that are best grown in small towns a long way from city life. There's a lot of red clay and long nights in every line she puts her paper."
"Reading Janice Daugharty is like sitting on a Gerogia porch listening to family tales, squabbles, and secrets. She knows her territor, evoking her home state and its people with grace and poignancy."