Christmas Mourning

by Margaret Maron

  With mischief dancing in her dark eyes, Por looked up from buttering her roll and said, “I hear you got a Christmas present this morning.”

  I paused with a forkful of dill-dressed salmon in midair, unsure what she meant. “I did?”

  “Didn’t Dwight tell you?”

  “Tell her what?” he asked.

  “Don’t you get a morning report of everyone who’s been arrested overnight?”

  “We get it, but I don’t always read it when we’re as busy as we’ve been these last two days,” said Dwight.

  “So neither of you know that Zack Young has a new client?”

  “Don’t gloat, honey,” Avery said, cutting into his breast of chicken.

  “Who?” we both asked her.

  “Philip Hamilton.”

  “Who?”

  “Ellen Englert Hamilton’s seventeen-year-old son. He got pulled last night for a DWI. Blew a point-twelve’s what Gwen told me.”

  Gwen Utley’s a magistrate who keeps a jaundiced eye on everything that happens in the courthouse.

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  Portland shook her head. “Gwen never kids. She says that the first thing Ellen did when she came down to bail him out early this morning was call Zack Young. The second thing she did was resign from being president of the Colleton County MADD chapter. When it comes to throwing the book at a DWI, it would appear that being a mom trumps everything else.”

  Okay, it was mean of us. It was petty and uncharitable and totally callous. Nevertheless, Portland and I high-fived each other right there in the Dobbs country club and Avery had to catch the wine bottle we almost knocked over.

  “We must be getting old,” I said as we drove home that night. “There was a time when I’d’ve been embarrassed to leave a dance before midnight.”

  Portland had started yawning at nine-thirty, and when they decided to pack it in at ten, Dwight and I realized we were ready to head on home, too.

  As promised, I called Jess to let her know we were on our way.

  “Any progress in the Wentworth murders?” I asked once we had cleared town and were back in the country. I had been shocked to hear that those two bodies had lain exposed to the freezing rain and sleet for almost three days and he had amused me by describing Mrs. Alma Higgins of the four husbands.

  Now I listened while Dwight described how they seemed to have hit a dead end after he realized that the brothers had probably been jacklighting deer again and that Faison confirmed it. “Faison did give us the name of a guy who had potential as our killer.”

  “But?”

  “But he was in your court Friday morning and you gave him jail time.”

  “Oh. Sorry about that.”

  “Me, too. But you know all that equipment that was missing from the Welcome Home store? I forgot to tell you. We found it in a shed back of Jason Wentworth’s trailer. And it turns out that Matt Wentworth’s friend Nate Barbour used to work at the store.”

  “He say what they did with the concrete Jesus?” I asked.

  “No. But then he claims not to know anything about the shed or the thefts.”

  That reminded me of the defendant who wanted his jail terms to run concurrently because his daughter had the smiling mighty Jesus.

  Dwight laughed out loud at that and we were in a good mood as we drove into the yard to find some eight or ten vehicles, not just the kids’ but some of their parents.

  “What’s happened?” he asked.

  I started to panic when I saw Seth, who’s five brothers up from me, come around the corner of the house alone. He was hatless as usual, and before he could meet us at the porch steps, I smelled smoke on his denim jacket.

  “What’s wrong?” I called.

  And Dwight said, “Where’s Cal?”

  Seth heard the urgency in our voices and made a calming motion with his hands. “Everything’s fine. We’ve got a little bonfire going down by the pond. The children want to give you the Christmas present they’ve all chipped in for, but first you’ve got to get out of those fancy dancing clothes, though I have to say, you do look mighty pretty, honey.” He paused a couple of beats and grinned widely. “You look mighty pretty, too, Dwight.”

  Both of us would trust Seth with our lives, and since he was clearly enjoying the moment, we didn’t argue, just hurried inside and changed into jeans and sweatshirts.

  When we came back out, dressed for anything, Seth led us down the slope behind the house to the long pond and I saw Annie Sue’s truck parked next to Reese’s.

  Several of my brothers who live locally had come with their wives, even Barbara and Zach. Herman, Annie Sue’s dad, is pretty much confined to a wheelchair these days, but he sat beside Haywood in the golf cart Isabel uses to run around the farm on.

  Cal and several of the cousins were lounging on heavy canvas tarps. They had fetched lawn chairs from the garage and I saw Daddy seated on the far side of the bonfire with Ladybell, his redbone hound, at his feet.

  As Dwight, Seth, and I drew near, everyone yelled, “Surprise!” and at that instant, Annie Sue must have thrown a switch because the deck and two nearby willows sprang into colorful light. The kids had run Christmas tree lights on hooks along the base of our long narrow pier, all down the railing, and up into the trees. The lights reflected in the pond so brightly that I clapped my hands in delight.

  “Do you like it?” asked Annie Sue. “Are you surprised?”

  “Oh yes,” said Dwight, answering for both of us. “So this is what y’all’ve been doing when you were supposed to be installing circuit breakers?”

  “She done that too, ol’ son,” Haywood called.

  “Come on,” said Reese, grabbing me by the hand, while Jane Ann and A.K. pulled Dwight along, too.

  “To get the full effect, you need to go all the way out to the end of the pier and take a look from there.”

  We didn’t argue. Once we were at the end and looked back, it really was magical—the colored lights, the bonfire, the happy faces of our family. Cal came running and squeezed in between us to grab our hands.

  “Let ’er rip!” Reese called, and suddenly we became aware of light and sound behind us. We turned and there about twenty feet off the end of the pier, a jet of water shot up a good six or seven feet into the air.

  “Oh—my—God!” said Dwight, as the bubbling geyser changed from blue to green to red to yellow from submerged floodlights.

  “My idea,” Reese said proudly.

  CHAPTER 26

  And being, from the emotions he had undergone, or the fatigues of the day… much in need of repose, went straight to bed without undressing, and fell asleep upon the instant.

  —A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

  See now, Dwight, what you gotta do next summer,” said Haywood when we were all sitting around the bonfire later, “is get the wood and some shingles and a roll of window screen and we’ll build you and Deborah a pond house here. Waist-high walls, the rest screens.”

  “I’ll wire it,” said Annie Sue.

  “Make the west wall solid and I’ve got some neon beer signs that would look real good hanging on it,” Reese said.

  Getting into the swing of things, Will remembered that he had picked up a few himself at a going-out-of-business sale last month. “I can let you have ’em real cheap.”

  Barbara rolled her eyes and Dwight tried to look stern. “I’d appreciate it if y’all would quit encouraging her.”

  The whole family knows I’ve been crazy for neon ever since I was a child. There used to be a corner café on Dawson Street, on the way out of Raleigh. With windows on two sides and walls that were thickly hung with neon signs, that café was as colorful as a Christmas tree, and whoever was behind the wheel would always circle the block for me so I could look my fill. When I was sixteen and newly driving, I stole a blue guitar beer sign from a convenience store in Makely and had to spend the summer working off my crime to Daddy when he found out about it. The store owner let me keep it, tho
ugh, and it’s still in my old room back at the homeplace—along with a multicolored OPEN TILL MIDNIGHT sign I came home with after a New Year’s party when I was living with Aunt Zell. I still don’t know where or how I acquired that one. I keep thinking they’d look great on the wall of our back porch, but Dwight says they’d look tacky.

  “Two are tacky,” I agreed. “Eight or ten would be a collection.”

  “A tacky collection,” he told me.

  “I think those signs would be cool,” said Cal, who was sitting between us.

  I put my arm around him and gave him a quick squeeze. “Two votes for neon over here!”

  It was almost midnight, but Cal was on a sugar high from toasted marshmallows, and yes, that was probably why Haywood, Herman, and Robert were still awake, too. Between them, they’d emptied a whole bag.

  The kids dumped more fallen limbs on the fire, and Dwight and I listened while they interrupted each other in their eagerness to tell how they had decided to gift us with the fountain: how close they came to being discovered when Dwight came home unexpectedly for lunch yesterday, and how they were sure I’d realize that they were there last night to finish connecting a line they had buried from the new breaker box to the outlets they had installed on the pier.

  “Who was brave enough to get into that cold water to set up the floodlights and pump?” I asked.

  Stevie raised one hand and pointed to Reese with the other. “A friend of mine lent us some wet suits and skin diving equipment so we could finish setting everything in place today while y’all were at work. And yeah, it was really cold.”

  They showed us the switch for the recirculating pump that powered the geyser and the one for the submerged spotlights.

  “And we went ahead and ran some extra wire in case you want a ceiling fan in your pond house,” said Annie Sue.

  The kids seemed to take it for granted that we were going to build one so we could sit there on a summer evening and admire the fountain without being eaten by mosquitoes. In fact, they had already decided they could rig an outdoor shower and that an open-air pond house would make a cool place for summer parties. Most farm ponds, including the other five or six small ones on our land, are for irrigation and not at all pleasant to swim in—too shallow and too weedy; but this one covers about four acres and stretches across a long natural depression that was always too swampy to farm. One hot droughty summer when all the waterholes were drying up, Daddy had bulldozers come in and scoop it out so deeply all around that when they got to the center, they hit some underground springs and almost lost one of the dozers.

  The pier was another cooperative effort by my nieces and nephews and extends far enough out that we can swim without coming into contact with mud or weeds.

  The colored lights that shimmered on the surface of the water must have revived ancient memory, because when there was a lull in conversation, Daddy said, “I ever tell y’all about the first Christmas after my daddy passed? The tangerines?”

  There was a chorus of nos from his grandchildren and calls of “Tell us” from Will, Zach, and me. Robert, being older, smiled as if he knew the story and already anticipated our reaction.

  “Well,” said Daddy, “the way it was is that I was still three months shy of turning fifteen when my daddy died and left me the man of the family. There was Mammy, and Sister and Rachel and the twins…”

  His voice always trails off whenever he mentions his younger twin brothers, Jacob and Jedidiah. Jacob had drowned in Possum Creek when the two were sixteen, and Jed immediately ran away, lied about his age, and joined the Army. He was killed in a training exercise at Fort Bragg before he ever got out of the state.

  “Anyhow, it was getting on for Christmas and we was poor as Adam’s housecat. Mammy’d already told the little ones that Santa Claus probably won’t gonna be able to find our house, but they didn’t believe her and just kept talking about what they was gonna find in their stockings. Mammy’d made a rag doll for Rachel outten a flour sack she’d bleached white and did its hair and pigtails with tobacco string. Sister’d used pokeberries to dye a sack purple and stitched up a little doll dress and bonnet. I whittled out new slingshots and whistles for the boys and Mammy’d sent me over to the store to trade some eggs for a little poke of Christmas candy, but all the same, it was looking like a mighty thin Christmas.”

  Tenderhearted Ruth, who was seated on the tarp nearest him, squeezed his wrinkled hand and said, “Oh, Granddaddy, you must’ve felt just awful.”

  Cal was solemn-faced, as if trying to get his mind around a Christmas with nothing plastic or electronic under the tree.

  “Now right before Christmas, there come a rain like I ain’t seen in no December before nor since. Was like a hurricane only not no wind, just a hard, hard rain coming straight down like water outten the pump in our kitchen sink. Possum Creek flooded something awful. Getting on toward nightfall the next day, a truck drove into the yard and it was a man up from Florida looking to buy a couple of jars of whiskey from my daddy. Said he had two more deliveries to make over in Cotton Grove and he needed something to keep him warm on his trip back home, ’cause he was freezing to death up here.”

  Daddy paused and gave a foxy grin. “He must’ve finished off a jar of something a little earlier, though, ’cause it struck me that he was well on his way to being right warm already.

  “Well, he left when we told him Daddy was gone, but it won’t thirty minutes till here he come again, walking this time. His truck’d got stuck trying to cross the creek and he wanted me to help him get it out. See, the road won’t paved back then and the bridge was down almost level with the water, so mud was up to his axles before he ever got to the bridge. He said he’d give me fifty cents if I’d help him. Back then, fifty cents was like five dollars now, so I went right out to the lot and hitched up ol’ Maude.”

  “Who was ol’ Maude, Granddaddy?” Cal asked.

  My heart lifted at his unconscious use of that name because it surely meant that he felt himself a part of my family.

  “Best mule we ever had,” Daddy explained. “Strong as a Cub tractor and biddable as a dog.”

  High praise indeed.

  “When we got down to the creek, we unloaded the back of the truck to lighten it some and I seen he was carrying a pile of Florida fruit. Wood crates of oranges, tangerines, and some big yellow things I ain’t never seen before. First time I ever laid my eyes on grapefruit.

  “We stacked them boxes up on the creek bank and I tied a rope from Maude’s traces to the back of the truck, then that man heaved on one side and I heaved on the other and little by little we could feel it start to pull loose.

  “The thing was though that Maude was a-straining so hard that just as the truck come free, she let loose with a load of her own and the man stepped right in it. Well, sir, he jumped back, and when he did, his feet slid out from under him and he flailed back into that pile of crates. ’Fore you could say Jack Robinson, two crates of them tangerines tipped over and went tumbling down the creek bank, where they busted open on the rocks and the high water just carried ’em right away.

  “That man was cussing Maude and cussing me and even though I helped him load the truck back up, when I asked him for my fifty cents, he told me I oughta be a-paying him fifty cents for them tangerines and he just drove off without a thank-you or a kiss-my—”

  At this point, Daddy broke off and lit a cigarette to cover his chagrin at nearly using a crude expression in mixed company.

  “So what’d you do, Granddaddy?” asked Annie Sue.

  “Won’t but one thing I could do,” he told her. “I took Maude back to the mule lot and got my dip net and a gunnysack and went down to the fish trap I had rigged up a little further down the creek. Sure enough, when I got to it, there was all them shiny orange tangerines bobbling around in amongst the brush that’d got backed up from my trap. Took me almost an hour to fish them all out and lug that gunnysack back up to the barn. I give Mammy enough so everybody’s stocking got t
angerines, even mine and hers. Then I lugged the rest of ’em to Cotton Grove and traded for some store-boughten stuff Mammy’d been needing. Thanks to ol’ Maude, it was a real fine Christmas.”

  My brothers began to recall some childhood Christmases and my nieces and nephews chimed in with their own memories. How long we would have sat out there talking and laughing, I don’t know, but the wind shifted and the temperature started to drop. Cal’s eyelids were at half mast and Herman told Will he was about ready to get on back to Dobbs if he and Amy were ready to go, too.

  Seth and Richard gathered up the tarps, Reese turned off the fountain, and Daddy gave the fire a final poke that shot glowing sparks up into the starry sky.

  We trudged reluctantly back up to the house. There were good-night hugs all around and “See y’all on Christmas Day,” then Cal went to bed and we were alone except for Jess and Ruth, who stayed to help clean up.

  “Looks like I’ll need to make a garbage run tomorrow afternoon,” Dwight said as the girls carried another bag of dirty paper plates and napkins out to the garage. “If I wait till Saturday, all the barrels will be overflowing.”

  I don’t know if it was his remark or because Ruth was standing there, but the combination triggered my memory.

  “Hey, wait a minute, Dwight!” I said. “Saturday? Annie Sue and the little ones were here before you left for the dump, but Ruth and Jess didn’t come till after you got back.”

  “So?”

  “So whatever Ruth threw in the barrel Saturday morning should still be there!”

  “Huh?” said Ruth.

  “Come on,” I told her, hurrying out to the garage, where the five barrels were neatly lined along the wall: one for glass, one for aluminum, one for plastic, and two for general household trash. “You said you picked up trash when y’all were doing that memorial for Mallory Johnson, remember?”