Home Fires dk-6

by Margaret Maron

  The pencilled handwriting was my affected teenage loops and swirls right down to the little smiley face over the i. I felt my cheeks flame with the same embarrassment as when she’d confiscated that note in her classroom a hundred years ago.

  Mrs. Avery shook her head at me. “Oh, you were a one all right. Always thinking about the boys. And now here you are a judge and still unmarried. I thought surely—”

  “Time has a way of playing tricks,” I said hastily. I crumpled the note, stuck it in my pocket and fished a high school yearbook from the nearest carton. It was from a few years back when one of my brother Robert’s daughters was a freshman. It would be hard to open any one of these yearbooks and not see a Knott face somewhere in its pages.

  “Blessed if I know why I haven’t thrown out all these old test papers and record books,” Mrs. Avery said. “Really, the yearbooks should be souvenirs enough, don’t you think? Thirty-five years.”

  I was appalled. Thirty-five years of pounding sophomore English into the thick skulls of hormonal teenagers?

  “No wonder you’re enjoying this change of pace,” I said.

  “I’ve never worked so hard, but it’s such pleasure,” she agreed. “The front parlor and bedrooms are still to do over, but they’ll have to wait until I’ve finished up outside. After all those years in town, it’s so wonderful to be out here on King land where everything I see is beautiful and orderly. Come and let me show you what I’ve done with my mother’s roses. They’re the only thing my brother cared about. Isn’t it funny how men are with roses?”

  I would soon have to be thinking about landscaping the grounds around my own house, so I was actually interested as she pointed out rhododendrons and camellias and how the gardenias needed good air circulation so they wouldn’t mildew and if I wanted some of the baby magnolias that had volunteered around the mother tree, I should say now before she had Raymond root them out.

  She had planted more azaleas on the slope down to the narrow creek branch that ran between her property and the little dilapidated church just on the other side. Here in the heat of summer, the branch was barely a trickle of clear water.

  “A water garden with papyrus and blue flags would be so pretty down there, but—Come back here, Smudge!” she called sharply before her dog could cross the branch and muddy his paws. “My grandfather, Langston King, gave the land for that church, you know, so I can’t help feeling an interest in it. I’ve offered to have Raymond mow their grass and neaten up a little, maybe haul off those old cars, but I’m afraid Mrs. Williams took my offer wrong.”

  She would, I thought, suppressing a grin. Women like Grace King Avery could get me to agree to anything just to get rid of them, but Sister Williams was an implacable will that bent to no force.

  Burning Heart of God Holiness Tabernacle, pastored by the hot-tempered Reverend Byantha Williams, hasn’t had a fresh lick of paint in all the years I’ve known it and the tin roof sags precariously. The only thing that seems to hold up the branch side of the church is the ancient rusty house trailer backed up against that wall where Sister Williams lives with her four malevolent cats.

  Out back, behind the tiny graveyard, two wrecked cars and what looked like an old washing machine or refrigerator were half covered by kudzu vines. Even junk can look picturesque when smothered in vines. Too bad that kudzu hadn’t reached the church yet.

  Maidie shakes her head over the condition of this church because the congregation is too poor and too small to do more than patch and mend. It’s a dying church. Sister Williams’s standards are too rigidly puritanical and most of the young people deserted to other churches years ago. The average age is something like sixty-five. But what the members lack in youth and money they make up in fervor, and the rickety walls really rock when Sister Williams starts preaching. She’s in her seventies now and vows she’ll keep the church going as long as two or three be gathered together there in His name.

  We wandered back up to the house and I was framing a graceful goodbye when Mrs. Avery said, “Well, I’m sorry to rush you, Deborah, but you see how busy I am. Do thank Zell for me. It was so kind of her to send the irises. Now, Raymond, before you leave, if you could just—”

  Dismissed, I got in my car and eased back down the winding driveway, wondering if Raymond’s parents were as worried about the upcoming weekend as Andrew and April were.

  On the other hand, jail might just be the rest he needed after working for Mrs. Avery all week.

  As I neared the farm, it occurred to me for the first time that I was going to have to give some serious thought to a new driveway. The long pond’s on the back side of the farm and can be reached by several different tractor lanes which crisscross the land. My favorite runs across the Stancil farm, soon to be an upscale housing development complete with streetlights, sidewalks and golf course. Others are extensions of driveways belonging to Daddy and my brothers. If my family could monitor every time I came or went, to say nothing of every visitor’s coming and going, I might as well stay at Aunt Zell’s for all the privacy I’d be gaining.

  Certainly there was no privacy today. As I cleared the woods and came up to the building site that looked out over the pond, I saw six pickups, a bright red sports Jeep, a white Toyota and two horses parked (or tied) out by the deck. I recognized three of the pickups as belonging to the work crew who hammered away on the inside. The rest had brought nieces and nephews and several of their friends who were diving off the end of my brand-new pier.

  Farm ponds usually have such messy bottoms that wading out to swimming depth is enough to blight the fun of swimming because you know you’re going to have to wade back in through all the muck. Two weeks earlier, a pile driver from Fuquay came and sank a double row of ten-inch creosoted poles out to where the water’s ten feet deep. Then I had a lumber company deliver a stack of two-by-fours and pressure-treated boards and told A.K., Stevie, and the rest of the kids who still lived on the place that they could use the pier if they’d build it. I figured I might as well get a little work out of them since there was no way I’d be able to keep them off my half of the pond once the pier was built anyhow.

  Before I could switch off the engine, Zach’s daughter Emma was tugging at the door.

  “Wait’ll you try it!” she cried. Her hair was wet and so were her brown T-shirt and red shorts. “We just put the last nail in about an hour ago. You should’ve got here sooner. You could’ve been first off. This is so cool!”

  Yeah!

  Her excited voice took me back to when one of the promoters for a community pool tried to sign Seth and Minnie up for membership half my lifetime ago.

  “It’s going to be Olympic size with a wading pool for the little ones and water slides and high boards for the teenagers,” the neighbor said. Being a brand-new teenager myself then, I was ready to run right home and beg Mother and Daddy to sign up as charter members, too.

  No more yucky pond bottoms? No more skinned knees on those sharp creek rocks? No beating the banks and water first in case there were water moccasins around? No more squatting behind chigger-laden bushes if nature called?

  Hot damn! Civilization was coming to Cotton Grove for sure.

  Seth had looked around at the eager faces of his children and even though cash money was tight in those days, he was ready to pledge his financial support when the neighbor lowered his voice and added, “ ’Course it’ll be—you know—restricted?”

  I’m told it’s still restricted, but I don’t have firsthand knowledge since none of us ever joined and no Knott ever swam there.

  Uncle Ash and Aunt Zell have an in-ground lap pool for his heart and Robert and Doris have one of those big blue plastic prefab things out back of their house for their grandchildren, but unless we’re at the coast, the rest of us have pretty much made do with Possum Creek.

  This was going to be a lot more convenient and I wondered why some of my brothers hadn’t done it a long time ago. Was it because the spring-fed ponds had been dredged for utilitarian r
easons? For irrigation and fishing, not for swimming?

  I walked out on the solid planking and admired everything the kids had done. As I stood on the very end, Herman’s son Reese came up dripping from the water at my feet and grabbed my ankle. My ball cap flew off and I felt myself falling through the sunlit air to land with a huge splash in deep cool water.

  Even with all my clothes on, it felt wonderful, although when I got my hands on Reese, I tried to sit on his head for catching me off guard like that.

  Stevie, home on summer vacation from Carolina, was standing on the pier laughing his head off when Seth’s Jessica gave him a mighty shove from behind.

  Soon the water was swarming with fully clothed whooping and hollering kids, all from here in the neighborhood. Oh well, I thought. Kids—even farm kids—have so many sophisticated distractions these days. Maybe the pier’s homespun novelty would wear off before my house was finished and this privacy thing became an issue. I missed A.K. and his sister, though. Normally they would be here with the rest.

  When I was thoroughly cool, I climbed out and sat on the pier to squeeze water from my shirt and shorts.

  “Hey, you know what?” said Emma, treading water in front of me. “For Deborah’s housewarming gift, we ought to take up a collection and buy her a beach.”

  “A beach?” asked Stevie, who was floating nearby.

  “Yeah. A dump truck full of sand. How much could it cost?”

  “Do you know how many truckloads it’d take to make even a ten-foot-wide beach?” said her brother Lee. “It’d cost a pure fortune.”

  “And your only paternal aunt’s not worth a fortune?” I cooed sweetly.

  They all hooted and I had to scuttle down the planked pier toward land to keep from getting splashed again.

  ✡ ✡ ✡

  My sneakers squished with every step as I walked up to the house still dripping water. My ball cap was the only thing that had escaped a soaking.

  Delight welled up in me as I viewed my new house. Pride of ownership, too. From the outside, it was starting to look like a proper dwelling now that the roof was on and most of the siding was up. The south windows had been set since I was last out, which meant that Sheetrocking couldn’t be too far behind.

  I had stopped at a store on the way out and filled a cooler with soft drinks and as I pulled it out of the trunk of my car, Will appeared at my elbow.

  “Let me help you with that, little sister,” he said, grabbing the other end.

  Seth had offered to oversee the construction and Haywood was all set to get his feelings hurt if I didn’t choose him even though both brothers were knee-deep in tobacco when the bank finished approving my loan and I was ready to break ground. Fortunately, summer is the slowest season in Will’s auctioneering business and for some reason, he really wanted to do this for me. Since Will actually worked in construction for a couple of years after he left the farm, I agreed.

  Will’s my mother’s oldest child, good-looking and a bit of a rounder. You can’t always count on him to finish what he starts, but when he does work, he works smart. Sometimes the other boys feel a little jealous and say I’m more partial to Seth, so it helps when I can favor one of them over Seth.

  We carried the cooler onto what would be a screened porch overlooking the pond and the others inside took a break and came out to join us for a cold drink and something from the snack bag I’d also brought.

  They were a pickup crew from here in the neighborhood—two white men, a Mexican, and a black man who was the only one who’d actually worked with steel framing before. According to Will, they’d each grumbled about it though. He hadn’t been all that thrilled at working with the stuff himself. Yeah, yeah, he knew it was the wave of the future, termite proof, cheaper, more energy efficient, et cetera, et cetera.

  “All the same, wood’s more forgiving,” he said every time the metal frames popped their bolts or threatened to wobble out from under the men.

  Now that everything was braced six ways to Sunday, the house felt as sturdy to him as Adam’s literature had promised.

  “It might actually stand up in an earthquake,” he teased me.

  Earthquakes aren’t a real big problem in North Carolina. I was more interested in hearing that the house could withstand the wind force of a hurricane and the jaws of industrial-strength termites.

  As the men finished their break, Herman’s Annie Sue came out on the porch. She wore a sleeveless yellow tee, cutoffs, and heavy leather work shoes with bright yellow socks. Her chestnut hair was tied back in a ponytail.

  “I’m all caught up with you, Uncle Will,” she said, unbuckling the tool belt from her sturdy waist. “Nothing more I can do till the Sheetrock’s up. Hey, Deborah. One of those drinks got my name on it?”

  “And a Nab,” I said, holding out the bag.

  She broke open the cellophane wrapper and bit into the cheddar crackers smeared with peanut butter. Orange crumbs showered down the front of her shirt.

  Herman started teaching Reese about electricity before Annie Sue was born, but she’s a better electrician than he’ll ever be.

  Will went back inside and the two of us sat there on the porch steps sipping our Diet Pepsis as we looked out over the long pond where her cousins and older brother still frolicked in the water at the end of the pier.

  “Come on in,” they cried, but we both shook our heads even though I was still damp from the water and Annie Sue was equally damp from her hot sweaty work.

  Reese’s truck radio was set on a golden oldies country station and scraps of tinny banjo and guitar music floated up to us. The sun baked us dry as it started its long slow slide down the western sky. A male bluebird swooped down on a grasshopper and flew off toward the woods. A field of shoulder-high corn rippled greenly at the edge of my new boundaries. Music, laughter and splashing on one side, the sound of hammers on the other, yet I could feel peacefulness sinking into my bones.

  “You picked you one of the prettiest places on the whole farm,” Annie Sue said, unconsciously echoing my own thoughts. “Least it would be one of the prettiest if you could get Uncle Haywood to take away that old greenhouse.”

  “He says he’s going to refurbish it,” I said.

  “And you believe him?” she asked cynically.

  Haywood gets enthusiasms but he and Will are a lot alike about sticking to things. The difference is that Will works smart while Haywood can only work hard.

  About five years ago, Haywood decided he was going to get into truck farming in a big way. Cut back on tobacco, go heavy on produce.

  “The man who gets the first tomatoes to market gets to the bank first, too,” he said. “First truckload of watermelons you’n get five dollars apiece. Last load, you can’t give ’em away for fifty cents.”

  So he bought some big metal hoops, covered them in heavy plastic sheets and built himself a greenhouse sixty feet long and twelve feet wide down at the far end of the pond where his and Andrew’s land comes together. And he diligently sowed flats of tomatoes and watermelons. And when they were the right size, he transplanted them out into the fields where they promptly drowned in one of the wettest springs we’d had in years.

  Undaunted, he tried again the second year and did indeed get the first truckload of local tomatoes to the market where they had to compete against the tomatoes and watermelons being trucked up from Georgia and South Carolina.

  According to Seth, who keeps all the boys’ farm records on his computer, Haywood netted about eighty-five cents on the dollar that year.

  “I tried to tell him to grow yuppie things for the Chapel Hill crowd,” Seth said. “Leeks, snow peas, or fancy peppers. But all he knows are tomatoes and watermelons.”

  That winter, a storm shredded the plastic walls and Haywood lost interest in his greenhouse. Yet there it still stands—overgrown with weeds, rusting away, tattered banners of plastic fluttering like fallen flags in every breeze, a blight on the landscape at the end of the pond, right smack-dab in the middle of
my view.

  “I could string it with Christmas tree lights,” Annie Sue offered. “Turn it into found art?”

  “I think that only works for urban areas,” I said.

  As we contemplated Haywood’s eyesore, A.K. drove down the lane and pulled up at the edge of the pond. The kids fell silent as he got out and walked towards them and I could tell from their body language that they felt awkward.

  From beside me, Annie Sue murmured, “Ruth’s been crying all afternoon. Emma tried to get her to come over and help with the pier, but she wouldn’t. God! A.K.’s such a jerk!”

  But the worry in her voice betrayed her.

  He must have been working on the pier either last night or early this morning because he scooped up a tool belt and one of the hammers that were piled on the bank.

  “They say it might rain tomorrow,” he said, tossing them into the cab.

  The cousins came up to him then while their friends hung back, exchanging uneasy glances.

  Suddenly, from Reese’s truck came the raucous tones of Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock.” Stricken, Emma raced over to snap it off, turned the wrong knob and the music blared louder than ever. “Everybody in the old cellblock—”

  Abrupt silence.

  A.K. shrugged and gave a wry grin. “Good timing.”

  “Hey, man, we practiced,” said Reese, trying to turn it into a joke, knowing he’d done a couple of things just as bad, knowing that there but for the grace of God...

  “Yeah, well, see you guys.”

  As A.K. turned back to his truck, Annie Sue raced down and gave him a hug. I followed and when I put my arms around him, he clung to me for an instant as if he were seven again instead of seventeen.

  “You’ll be all right,” I whispered. “The jailer knows who you are. Just go with the flow and you’ll be fine, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said shakily.

  12

  God already made my day.

  —Goodwill Missionary Baptist

  That evening, after the work crew had departed and the kids had scattered to their Friday night diversions, after I’d quit raking up pieces of shingles, scrap ends of two-by-fours and bits of plastic pipes, I drove over to visit with Daddy a few minutes and maybe get a bite to eat.