Gone to Green

by Judy Christie

  "Nice to see you again," I said, holding out my hand. "I owe you a big thank-you for cleaning up my yard months ago. I'm sorry I haven't stopped by to say thanks."

  His handshake was firm, and his hands calloused. "Good to see you again too. You are one busy lady, aren't you?" He gestured toward all the activities. "Congratulations on pulling this off."

  "Oh, lots of people did this. Thanks for coming."

  "Iris Jo told me you have been a ball of fire to get this thing going. She said you put it together by sheer force of will. My guys are sure enjoying themselves. They need a little something to do in the summer." He nodded over to where the football team clowned around at the booster table.

  "Craig, I mean Chris." I stumbled on his name.

  "Two first names," he said. "Happens all the time. No problem."

  "Well, anyway, you gave me directions that day out past my house, and you had your dogs with you. I understood Mannix and Kramer, but Markey?"

  "Markey Post, the actress. My brother loved her and named my puppy for her."

  Just then Katy came up to ask where to find more ice. "Hey, coach," she said. "Want to buy a snow cone?"

  The two of them walked off, and I shook my head, amazed at how connected I suddenly felt to so many people.

  As I stood there, Rose came up and gave me a big hug. "We're having our best day ever at the Holey Moley," she said. "Thank you so much."

  For the rest of the day, I flitted around, thanking people for coming and offering discount subscriptions to the paper. I gave away coupons for free classified ads, passed out surveys asking people to tell us what they wanted to read about, and drew names for door prizes.

  If I thought I had been in the middle of things on the city desk in Dayton, I was mistaken. I felt like an air-traffic controller who suddenly gets a chance to take a flight after years in the tower. It was as though I had been sitting on the sidelines before I came to Green, a spectator in my own life.

  Being on the field was a lot more intense, harder really, but on most days it was more fun.

  13

  Bayou Lake is low due to the recent drought, but spirits are high because Billy Ray Cyrus will be here performing his hits from the early nineties at the Bouef Parish Fair.

  -The Green News-Item

  One day I dashed into the post office, and my car wouldn't start five minutes later. "It's the heat," Tammy said, pulling out jumper cables. "It drains the battery faster than anything."

  Another day I went out to the parking lot and a long crack had appeared on my windshield, from the bottom almost to the top. "It's the heat," Tom told me. "If you have a little nick in your windshield, it spreads when you have your car shut up on these hot days."

  Despite the lack of rain, the heat settled on you like a damp blanket, with humidity soaring. The only laugh I got that week was when Tom said, "You just have to get used to the humisery."

  Temperatures topping one hundred and humidity to match consumed conversations-from Bud and his agriculture report to the ladies from the garden club who watered their flowerbeds twice a day.

  "You're going to be shocked by the light bill," Stan said one morning.

  "I'm wilting on my route," Rose said, moving slowly at the Holey Moley. "My new hobby is tracking how hot it gets in my mail truck."

  High school football practice was moved to 5 a.m., and still parents complained. I heard from Iris Jo that Chris had lost lots of his catfish. They died or were too fishy smelling when he took them in to sell.

  The lake was so low the beautiful homes at Mossy Bend were sitting up high and dry.

  "Having lived through July in Louisiana," I told Marti on the phone, "I thought I could live through anything. I hadn't counted on August."

  My yard was cracked and brown, and my flowers barely held on. The hydrangeas that had been so beautiful earlier in the summer wilted and begged for water. When I went out to water, the mosquitoes got after me, apparently the only creatures that flourished in these temperatures. My air conditioner ran nonstop, and I found myself dreading small errands.

  Katy proved to be a bright spot during these hot weeks. Since the downtown festival, she had become downright chatty, occasionally popping up in the newspaper parking lot or dropping by my office. Sometimes she would ask me a question about the paper, trying to act as though the answer didn't matter. At other times, she would tell me something going on in Green, something the kids talked about or that she heard at church.

  "You coming back to our church?" she asked one day.

  "I don't know ... maybe one of these days when things settle down a little. What brought that up?"

  "Pastor jean asked about you the other day. She saw me and Molly talking to you at the festival, and she asked if we were friends and if I might be able to talk you into visiting the church again. Said we sure could use you."

  I made a joke and changed the subject.

  People had not let up on trying to get me to church.

  "Have you found a church home yet?" was another of those questions I came to dread. Pastors from the big churches downtown kept saying I was "always welcome." Mr. Marcus tried to get me to come speak to his Sunday school class at the Morning Star Baptist Church, and the angry pastor from another town put me on his church newsletter mailing list.

  To top it off, Marti was steadily dating a seminary student she had met through a friend of a friend and was church shopping in Dayton. "I am determined to find a place where I fit in spiritually," she said. "I have high hopes for this relationship, and I need to get back to church."

  Going to church was a big deal in Green.

  "Never plan any kind of community gathering on Wednesday evenings," Tammy said one day at the Holey Moley, "because that's prayer meeting night. You can't stir up a crowd for anything else on a Wednesday."

  Linda agreed as she packaged up Tammy's costume jewelry purchase. "If I skip church, I still put on my church clothes to go out to eat. That way people think I attended services."

  The staff at the paper planned its vacations around vacation Bible school. It beat anything I had ever seen.

  Aunt Helen was what was called locally "a church-going woman," and she often mentioned her faith. Since the festival, we visited every week or so, usually over a meal at the Cotton Boll Cafe. She asked good questions and listened to my answers, occasionally throwing in a piece of wisdom that immediately put an issue in perspective.

  One evening at the diner, I brought up a topic that weighed on me. "I don't understand why so many things are done in shades of gray in Green. How can people live with the double standard, going to church on Sunday but being so mean during the week?"

  "Lois, a lot of things in life aren't clear-cut," she said. "People are given choices. That's why God gave us a brain. I think he'd be insulted if we just went along without ever asking questions or trying to figure out a new way of seeing something."

  She poured creamer from a tiny plastic container into her coffee, adamant that caffeine did not keep her awake at night. "Matter of fact, that's one of the things I like about you ... you're always questioning God."

  "I hate to disagree with you, Aunt Helen," I said, "but for once, you are wrong. I don't question God. I ignore him-or her or whatever it is."

  Although she was not an overly affectionate woman and one of the few people in Green who did not seem to feel the need to hug, she reached over and touched my hand.

  "Sugar, you may not realize it, but you've done nothing but question God since the day you got to town. I would bet good money this started before you got here, maybe right about the time your friend died. I'd say God is working in ways you haven't even begun to imagine."

  Our regular waitress stopped at that moment to offer Helen a special bite of cobbler. "We tried this recipe out today," she said, ignoring me. "See what you think."

  "Sold!" Helen said, smacking her lips "I'll be back for more.

  The waitress usually snapped at me and treated Helen like royalty, going b
ack to our first meal there together.

  "She's a Yankee, isn't she?" the woman asked and thrust her order pad in my face. "I might as well tell you right now. We don't do Miracle Whip, and we don't do Pepsi."

  Helen helped me make decisions about the paper with her outspoken opinions. I asked her about things I was hesitant to broach with Iris Jo, such as where Lee Roy had come from and his relationship with Major.

  "I am not a fan of either of those two," she said when I visited her room one day. "They spend too much time looking after their own interests and never acting on behalf of anyone else. They're thicker than thieves, and you need to keep your eyes open.

  "Could you be a bit more specific, please?" I asked. "I mean, do you have any information I can use?"

  "I have suspected for years that Lee Roy is stealing from the paper, but I don't have any proof. There's something going on with him that just does not add up. I'm not sure about my nephews. You're a smart thing. You'll figure it out one of these days."

  Then she changed the subject. "I wish folks would quit complaining about the blasted weather. It's always hot in August, and I will never understand why people act every year like it surprises them."

  During our get-togethers, I also talked about my future.

  "I miss the city," I told her one evening. "There was always something going on there. And I miss the big newsroom with all its hustle and bustle. Even the yelling and the cranky copy desk."

  She gave one of her trademark harrumphs. "Plenty going on here, too," she said. "But you'll have to be the one to decide where you're supposed to be."

  "I admit I've enjoyed this more than I ever thought I would," I said. "I'm even thinking I might want to get on the publisher track somewhere, run one of the big papers. I think I could do it. What do you think?"

  "Of course you could do that, but you'll never get rich working for someone else," she said, always adamant about my building financial independence. "You need to take advantage of that keen mind of yours. There isn't some man coming along on a white horse to save you. He'll probably be driving some broke-down pickup and want you to pay the note on a new one.

  "Do you think the McCullers should have held onto the paper?"

  "Goodness gracious, no," she said, immediately. "Those boys were running that newspaper right into the ground and Green right along with it. You have to have a lot of heart to run a newspaper, a passion of sorts. That's why God sent you down here to us."

  "But, Aunt Helen ... "

  She threw up her wrinkled hand. "Shush. No more. You're the right person for this place. It's the right place for you. Now, let's move on."

  "Ouch," I said.

  "I'm an old woman. I have to speak my mind," she replied.

  One evening we saw Katy and her parents leaving the Cotton Boll as we arrived.

  "You need to help that girl," Helen said. "Rustle up some work for her. She needs something to keep her out of trouble."

  Ashamed that I had not thought of hiring Katy, I ran the idea by Iris Jo, conscious of how the girl's presence might be a reminder of her loss.

  "I thought she might write a column for teens, interest them and their parents in the newspaper. It would certainly give her something to focus on and make her a little spending money. Plus, it would be fun to have her around the newsroom," I said in my not-so-subtle sales pitch.

  "It would be great to have her here," Iris Jo said. "She needs something to do, and I've always thought she was one of those girls who had special gifts to develop. If there's anything I can do to help, let me know."

  When I brought the idea up, however, Katy was immediately cool to it. She had a career path in mind that involved going to beauty school and opening her own shop.

  "I am not a brain," she said in that tone of voice she used when I first met her on the loading dock. "You feel sorry for me, don't you? You're just trying to be nice."

  As she went on, I could tell she wanted me to talk her into it.

  "Katy, I love having you around, so I have to admit that I am trying to be nice. But I also have been watching you for weeks now. You're plugged into everything in town."

  I picked up the end of the long, beaded necklace she wore. "You would bring down the stodgy factor of The News-Item considerably. You are the ideal combination of local person and fresh voice. We'd pay you, of course. Not much, but enough to help you buy some of that gum to quit smoking."

  "I'll think about it," she said and dashed out the door, whether in excitement or anger I could not tell. The next day she was back with a sample column and a notebook with a list of ideas.

  "I guess it wouldn't hurt anything if we gave it a try," she said. Her journalism career had begun.

  The staff was friendly to her. I worried Alex might be too friendly, his twenty-two years to her sixteen. Katy hung around the newsroom all the time, even when she had already turned in her column or finished a story.

  In only a couple of weeks, she decorated her cubicle in her own way, including an old typewriter she bought on a clearance table at the Holey Moley, a thrift shop lamp, and a small picture of Matt. She had an oversized homemade ceramic mug filled with an assortment of pens and pencils in wild colors, and she always had tape and scissors nearby. She was constantly cutting something out of a magazine or one of the city papers and tacking it to her bulletin board.

  "That's my idea file," she said.

  Tom turned out to be a great writing teacher. He sat patiently with her, showing her when to use active verbs and how to improve transitions in her thoughts. Eavesdropping the first time or two, I was afraid he would hurt her feelings or that she would snap at him and hurt his. To the contrary, she lit up when he went through her copy, asking questions and making changes with enthusiasm.

  One day she stood up, gave him a big hug, and said, "Thank you so much." In my nearly two decades in the newsroom, I don't recall ever seeing a reporter hug an editor for a job well done. Tom and I both nearly fell out. He even started taking a little more care with his appearance, as though maybe he was not at the boring end of his career after all.

  When school opened, Katy's devotion to the paper increased. She got the school bus to drop her off right out front most days. I found myself watching for her and worried if she did not show up on schedule.

  "You can't believe how hot that bus is," she said nearly every day. "It's unbearable." Her clothes were wet with sweat.

  "The A/C doesn't work?" Tom asked.

  "A/C?" she shrieked, rolling her eyes. "Like those buses have air-conditioning. What dream world do you live in? The driver told us today it was 119 degrees on our bus. We ought to do an expose or something on that."

  With that pronouncement, she wandered over to the Coke machine, and Tom and I looked at each other. That conversation led to Alex, Tom, Tammy, and I each riding a different bus every afternoon for a week and recording the temperatures, interviewing the driver and students. The results were shocking and made for good news stories and editorials. That coverage led parents to organize a community meeting, demanding the school board come up with a plan to phase in air-conditioned buses over the next three years.

  Katy's new column and access to the paper gave her a sort of celebrity status among her classmates, which she fully exploited. "Why don't we start a school society feature?" she asked one day at a staff meeting. "You know, with party pictures and gossip about what kids are doing."

  She also told me we needed to add a teen advisory board, similar to the community business group.

  "Those downtown people made something happen," she said. "Let's try something with kids. Maybe we can come up with some real news." She walked off, laughing, sounding oddly like bossy Aunt Helen.

  I turned Katy loose on the teen project with a "yes" and fifty dollars. Next thing I knew, I was sitting in on meetings of a diverse group of kids whose interests ranged from bow hunting deer to the latest video games. The ideas flew, and Katy was a strict leader, keeping everyone from talking at once. Those id
eas turned into features that students wrote and got five bucks each for.

  "Could I sell some advertising?" one student asked. "You know, a booster page."

  I looked over at Tammy, who often sat in on the meetings. She shrugged.

  "Sure," I said. "We'll pay you a commission on whatever you sell."

  The decision annoyed Lee Roy when I mentioned it later. "What do you mean? Kids selling advertising? This isn't a game, Lois."

  He mumbled under his breath as he left.

  Katy added something the paper needed, a young, enthusiastic spark. When she helped Alex look through records, still digging for the elusive fact that would complete the development story, she was excited about any pattern she came up with. When she painted the death names on the front window, she added hearts and flowers and made them look special. When one of her interviews turned out to be especially good, she would burst into the building. "Listen to this, everyone. Listen to what I've got."

  On her seventeenth birthday, she got her mother to bring her by the newspaper before school. "Happy birthday to me," she said, bursting into the newsroom with a box of doughnuts. "In honor of the occasion, free doughnuts with sprinkles!"

  And off she went.

  Occasionally I would see Iris Jo at Katy's desk or vice versa, the two visiting and sometimes laughing. You could almost feel the healing taking place.

  14

  Business owner Tommy Carter hopes to hear a peep out of you. Tommy credits the Green Forward program with saving his hardware store and is giving away free chicks as a thank you. "Old customers are coming back, and we're seeing dozens of new ones," he said. "If y 'all come in this week, I'll give you a free gift."

  -The Green News-Item

  An uneasy thought nagged at me.

  The year was flying by, and arrangements needed to be made to sell the paper.

  At first I put it off, using one excuse or another, ranging from the country club incident to the downtown festival plans to prep football coverage, which I had learned was extremely important to Green readers.