Whistlin' Dixie in a Nor'easter

by Lisa Patton

  After a long break, and two cups of coffee, the boys told me they were finally ready. Jeb moaned and groaned the whole way up the hill. It’s not like it was a huge hill but it did take some work to get up there.

  “Couldn’t you have picked a spot closer to the house?” Jeb asked me. Beads of sweat trickled down his broad face, even though it couldn’t have been more than two degrees outside.

  “It’s the prettiest spot in the yard. I want it to be nice for her,” I said.

  “She don’t care, she’s dead.”

  “Oh yes, she does. And even more, I care.”

  Jeb and his buddy, Frank, carried the jackhammer and I pulled a little wagon with two big stockpots of boiling water. Even though I had the lids on both pots, the water swished around and spilled all over the sides. Once we got to the base of the hill, the two guys had to come back down and carry the pots up to the top. They were way too heavy for me. Both of them murmured under their breath as they leaned forward on their way to the top. I don’t know what they were complaining about, it’s not like they weren’t getting paid—and paid well.

  At the top, Jeb cranked up the jackhammer. I tipped the first pot over and we all watched as the snow washed away and the water slowly seeped into the ground. Jeb helped me pick the second one up and both of us dripped the water little by little onto the spot until it made a muddy paste.

  “Hurry up, Jeb, get the jackhammer going,” I told him. “We don’t want the ground to freeze back up.”

  “Alreet, already, I’m going as fast as I can.”

  Jeb and Frank picked up the jackhammer, put the spirally point right on the muddy spot, and cranked her up. All three of us had on ear protectors resembling headphones. They came with the rental. Even with those on I still heard that thing echoing in my ear for days.

  Once they had the hole dug I asked Jeb if he thought he might like to moonlight as a wintertime gravedigger. I told him I thought people might pay big bucks to be able to get their grieving over with.

  He let go of that jackhammer and Frank lurched for it just before it fell to the ground. Jeb’s face was all sweaty and he looked over at me like I was out of my mind. “Have you forgotten about my number-one job? There is way too much going on at JCW for me to spend my precious time digging graves.”

  “It was only a suggestion,” I said, holding my hand up. “Don’t ever say I never tried to help you become a millionaire.”

  I watched Frank’s eyes nearly pop out of his head as he picked up the jackhammer and held it close beside him. That’s right, Frank, I thought to myself. You’re no fool; make your hay while the sun is shining, or in this case while the sky is snowing.

  The funeral started at 2:00 P.M. Sunday and in attendance were Pierre, Roberta, Peter, and Jeb. And of course, Sarah, Isabella, and me. The girls and I wore our dark colors when it came time for the service. We couldn’t wear dresses, obviously, but we dressed up in our nicest long pants and sweaters.

  We all gathered at the bottom of the hill and in single file made the trek up to the top. I led the way, carrying Princess Grace Kelly in an old Donald J Pliner shoebox. It was the only thing I could find that was fitting for her. I certainly wasn’t about to put her in a Sorel boot box. The only problem with the Donald J Pliner box was that I had to cut out a little hole on the side for Gracie’s tail. When she was waiting on the garden shed shelf it must have frozen sticking straight out.

  Sarah carried Gracie’s grave marker. “Princess Grace Kelly (Gracie). Beloved pet of Leelee, Sarah & Isabella. We will 4ever miss you.” The girls and I spent the better part of the day before the funeral painting the wooden cross and Jeb nailed a long piece of wood to the back to bury it into the ground.

  Isabella carried Gracie’s favorite old toy. She’d had it since she was a puppy, one of my old worn-out slippers, and she kept it hidden under my bed.

  On the way up the hill Jeb whistled “Taps” and I had to bite my lip to keep from crying. I wanted to be able to get through the eulogy, at least, without sobbing. The tears could come later.

  Once we all gathered on the top of the hill, I pulled out my carefully planned speech from my coat pocket and started the service. “I’d like to thank y’all for coming.” I cleared my throat. “Princess Grace Kelly was fifteen, that’s a hundred and five in doggie years. She was born in her beloved hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, to two registered AKC Yorkshire Terriers. And I can’t remember their names. Sorry, Gracie,” I said, and looked up at the sky.

  “Princess Grace Kelly was a wonderful dog, the best any person could ask for. She was loyal and loving and watched over her owners at all times. Gracie loved everyone here. She really did.” When I looked up and saw everyone smiling my voice cracked. “I can’t say that she loved Vermont or all this ridiculous snow, but she appreciated everything each and every one of you did for her. As hard as it was for her here, there were some good things. She would have never tasted pâté if she had never made the move. And that’s thanks to your marvelous cooking, Peter.” I glanced over at Peter for reassurance. “She enjoyed a rich diet of goose liver pâté right until the day she died.”

  Peter winked and smiled back at me with an impish grin.

  “Roberta. You always made sure that Gracie had fresh water both in the kitchen and upstairs in our apartment and you were always so good about keeping clean newspaper in every corner of our owners’ quarters. She so appreciated that,” I said, and looked straight at her.

  Roberta gloated like she was family.

  “Jeb. If Gracie were here, I know she would be thanking you for making this winter funeral possible. I know it was terribly hard work, but don’t think for a second it’s gone unnoticed. Gracie is up in heaven right now, with her little jeweled crown on her head, looking down on you and wanting to lick your face.”

  Jeb puffed out his chest and glanced around at everyone else for credit and appreciation.

  “And Pierre. What can I say about you? You welcomed her into your cottage, gave her doggie treats out the wazoo, picked up her poop in the dining room, and protected her from Helga. You were a great friend to Gracie, Pierre, and she so loved you.”

  Pierre looked up at the sky, kissed his fingers, and threw Gracie a kiss.

  “Sarah and Isabella.” I squatted down to their level. “Gracie has been around your whole lives. Life will be much different now, but she will always live on in our hearts. Gracie protected you both from the minute you were born. She barked her head off any time someone unfamiliar came near you. She absolutely loved you from the bottom of her heart.”

  I stood back up, folded my piece of paper, and shoved it into the pocket of my coat. “Does anyone have anything else to say about Gracie? Don’t be shy, say what you feel.”

  Nobody said anything for the longest time, and I was afraid they might let the moment pass, when Roberta raised her hand.

  “Yes, Roberta, go ahead.”

  She stepped forward out of the group. “Princess Grace Kelly was a beautiful dog. I enjoyed being around her and I’m happy she moved here with yous.” Roberta nodded her head, and took a giant step backward to rejoin the others.

  “Thank you, Roberta. Anyone else?”

  “I think we’ll all miss Gracie,” Peter said from where he stood, and then he smiled and held his hand over his mouth like he was trying to keep from laughing. Okay, it was a bit over the top, I know that. But still, it was Gracie and she deserved to be buried in the ground and said nice things about for goodness’ sake!

  It was when Pierre broke down in sobs and fell to the ground that Peter totally lost it. His shoulders started shaking and he grabbed his scarf and pulled it up over his mouth but that didn’t work. Finally he turned around and tried not watching, but that didn’t help, either. Nothing he tried made him stop laughing and it didn’t take long for it to become contagious. Pretty soon I got tickled and couldn’t stop for the life of me. My little copycats joined in, too. “Why are we laughing?” Sarah whispered, pulling on my sleeve.
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  “I’ll tell you later,” I tried to whisper back, but I was giggling so hard my stomach hurt and tears were rolling down my face.

  A certain someone didn’t share in our amusement. Jeb marched over to his shovel, yanked it up, and started tossing dirt on top of Gracie’s makeshift casket. “You people are downright strange.” One look at his dour face was all it took to get me going again.

  Pierre was still on his hands and knees sobbing when Roberta decided to take matters into her own hands. She stepped up again and in a loud voice announced: “That concludes our service, thank you all for coming.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  The art of fire building, to a Southern girl anyway, is not innate. When I asked Jeb to teach me how, he puffed out his chest and said, “Jeb Duggar, expert fire constructor, at your service, ma’am,” and saluted me.

  When he started whistlin’ “Light My Fire,” I shooed him off and said, “I’m serious now, I don’t want to build just any fire, I want a full, blazing, crackling, big one!”

  “All you need is four logs, some kindling, a big wad of newspaper, and a match.”

  Bless his little heart. “I know that. But they always die out after a short while. I can’t ever seem to keep one lit.”

  In his defense, it was his technique that made all the difference. All my previous attempts failed due to the way I stacked my logs. Jeb taught me how to lay the first two logs across the grate with about three inches in between the two. Then he laid two more on the diagonal on top of those logs, keeping a small parallelogram in between all four logs. Next came the kindling and the paper and he showed me how to put it in the parallelogram and stuff lots more up under the grate. The trick to the whole thing was not stacking all the logs on top of each other where no air could escape. “A fire’s got to breathe,” Jeb explained.

  Sunday nights were fairly slow at the Peach Blossom Inn, especially during the winter. On this particular Sunday night, around the first of February, we only fed twenty customers and they were all gone by 9:00 P.M.

  The girls were sound asleep and I had the inn all to myself. It seemed like a great time to try out my new Northerner skill and build a fire in the parlor. I had just put a match to it when I heard the floors creak in the main dining room.

  “Leelee, are you in there?” a voice called out.

  “Peter! You scared me for a second.” I turned around as he walked in the room.

  “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to.”

  “I thought you were gone.” He walked up next to me and we watched the fire spread out over the newspaper and kindling.

  “I got almost home and couldn’t remember if I turned off the ovens, so I decided to come back and check. Am I interrupting anything?”

  “No, no, no. I’m just trying out my new pyro technique. Jeb taught me how to build a fire. Woah.” The logs caught and popped like a crisp fall bonfire. The radiance illuminated the otherwise dark room and I couldn’t help but notice how cute Peter looked in the firelight. He wore an old pair of Levi’s, an off-white corduroy shirt he had rolled up at the sleeves, and a white thermal underwear shirt underneath.

  “You’re a quick learner,” he said.

  “Thanks. I’m pretty proud of myself, actually. You might not even know I was from the South, huh?”

  “The Souuuth? What would ever make me think thaaat?”

  “Fine, would you rather I tawok more like a New Joysey girl to make you feel more at home?”

  “As a matter of fact, I would not. I love the way you talk. And I also love this album.” He pulled up a chair to the fire. Van Morrison’s Moondance played softly in the background from the boom box I had nabbed out of the kitchen.

  I turned to face him with my back warming to the fire. “It’s one of my all-time favorite albums, ever.”

  “Looks like all you need now is a Grand Marnier.”

  “Oh, no.” I shook my head and waved my hand. “I’m not going there again, I’ve learned my lesson. Besides, I might tell you more stuff I don’t want you to know.”

  “You mean there’s more stuff about you that you don’t want me to know?”

  “There might be.”

  “Now you’ve got me intrigued. I’m grabbing a beer. Can I at least get you a beer or a glass of wine?”

  “I suppose so, surprise me.”

  Peter left for only a minute and came back with two beers. A Corona Light for me and a Guinness for him. He handed me the beer and sat down in the chair next to the fire.

  I had been dying to know more about his past but after he told me about his little brother stealing his girlfriend I never really knew how to bring it back up again. But he knew so much about me. “Where’d you learn to cook so well?” I asked him. “You hardly seem like you would ever need to be someone’s sous-chef. You’re a much better chef than Rolf could ever be.”

  “That’s kind of you to say, thanks. I’ve been around. Apprenticed under some amazing chefs in the city.”

  I sat down on the floor in front of the fire next to his chair. “So, now I know where you learned to cook; what about your love life? You’re too cute to have never been married.” Okay, it was out there. I told him he was cute.

  “I never said I haven’t been married.” He took a long sip of his beer.

  “Oh . . . you mean you were married? Once before?”

  “Yep. It didn’t work out.”

  “Well, I understand that. Just look at me. What happened to your marriage?” I pulled my legs up and rested my chin on my knees.

  Peter turned his head and stared at the fire. I sensed he didn’t want to talk about it.

  “You don’t have to tell me. Just forget I asked.”

  “No, actually I want to tell you. I’ve wanted to talk to you about it for a while now.”

  “I promise I won’t bite.” I gave him a big smile and giggled. He didn’t smile back.

  “My wife and I owned a restaurant together. Not much different than this place, but it was on the Jersey shore. We had a nice, loyal clientele. It had a great reputation and I was proud as hell of it. I worked hard to build it up, put in thousands of hours. As you know, it’s nearly impossible to get time off in this business. We were always busy.”

  I noticed he was picking at the label on his beer bottle and then started throwing the little pieces into the fire. “My younger brother worked with me. He was my sous-chef. I’d always looked after him, made sure he kept out of trouble. My wife, Shelly—that’s her name—worked as the hostess before the baby was born. But once he came along she liked to stay home and take care of him.”

  A child. He never mentioned that before. I watched him talk but he never took his eyes off the fire.

  “One August night, we were slammed and she knew I needed her to come in. She left Jeremy with a sitter. I was the one who told her it was okay. I mean the lady had raised three kids of her own.” He glanced at me briefly. I nodded in agreement with him.

  “Once Shelly got to work that night, she loosened up. Like she kind of enjoyed the break. She even had a couple of beers once we closed and I could tell she was happy to be hanging out with her friends again. We always got a late bar crowd and we were friends with all the regulars. She was having so much fun, I told her I’d go home and let the babysitter go so she could stay.”

  He picked up his beer and finished it all at once. There was a long pause before he continued.

  “On the way home, I could hardly keep my eyes open so when I got there I asked the babysitter if she would mind staying a little longer. I just needed a short nap before the baby woke up for his next feeding. All I wanted was a few minutes just to close my eyes.” As he said that, Peter dropped his head. Something about his tone of voice shot a chill through my spine.

  “I bet I hadn’t been asleep ten minutes when I woke to the sound of the babysitter frantically calling my name. She couldn’t get Jeremy to wake up. I always checked on him when I got home. Always. But that night I was beyond my exhaustion point and I .
. . never even peeked in on him. Doctors later determined it was SIDS.”

  It took a moment for the reality of what he had told me to sink in. Wanting to let him know I was there for him, I reached out and touched his arm. I ached to hold him in my arms and tell him it was all right, but he never touched me back. He just kept staring straight ahead into the fire. “I am so sorry, Peter. I never should have asked you.”

  “Of course you should have. How would you have known? I’m trying to move on with my life, that’s why I haven’t mentioned it before now. She said she didn’t blame me, but . . . we’re no longer together. And here’s the end of the story. Shelly fled into my brother’s arms. Given the devastation, I guess he was in a better position to console her.”

  My heart was breaking for him. “Is there anything I can do for you?” I asked, after a minute or so. “I feel so bad for you.”

  “Nope, but it felt good to tell you about it. Let’s change the subject, okay?” At last he turned around to face me. “I’m honestly trying to put it all behind me for good. Hey, I’ve got a toast but my bottle’s empty. Can I get you another?”

  “No, thank you. I’ve still got half of mine.” I held up my bottle to show him.

  When Peter came back from the kitchen, I was standing and my back was toward the fire. He raised his bottle in the air. “A toast. To new beginnings.”

  “I’d love to drink to that.” I raised my bottle and each of us took a sip, holding each other’s gaze long enough to be awkward. Right then, the familiar first chords of my favorite song on the record, “Into the Mystic,” softly began.

  “Ohhh, I love this song. It’s my very favorite Van Morrison song.” I started swaying to the music and held up my right arm with the Corona still in my hand. I had my eyes closed when Peter gently took the beer away from me and set it on a nearby table. My heart leaped out of my chest.

  Van crooned and Peter moved in toward me, clasped his left hand around my right, and slowly wrapped his other arm around my waist. My body tingled under his touch in a way that I hadn’t felt in much too long a time. At first it was hard for me to look at him but I could feel his eyes upon me and I raised my head and gazed up at him. His coy smile reassured me that he, too, was nervous. Somehow, even through the tension, it felt peaceful, and when he put his cheek just above mine, I could hear his breathing start to quicken. We moved very slowly, cautious with each step, gliding along with the music. Oh my God, we’re dancing!