by Ninie Hammon
“Of course,” Seth said evenly.
“Now wait a minute.” Bertrand shot a dirty look at the accountant, then turned to Abernathy.
“Where are you going to get this kind of money, Seth?” Abernathy asked. No challenge, simple curiosity.
Seth just stared at him with his dark eyes, long enough for the look to become uncomfortable. Then he rose to his feet. “Do we have a deal?”
“A deal? Absolutely not!” Bertrand sneered. “My client isn’t interested in any deal that—”
“We have a deal,” Abernathy cut him off and nodded.
“Then I don’t see that we have anything further to discuss.”
Bertrand rolled his eyes and slumped back in his chair, the accountant pored over the payment schedule document and Sam Abernathy studied Seth, a quizzical expression on his face.
“Good day, gentlemen.” Seth couldn’t manage a smile, even a small one. It just wasn’t there. He simply turned and strode out the door. He walked to his car without looking back, got in, drove out of the parking lot and turned west on KY 44. He managed to make it out of sight of the cooperage before he had to pull off on the side of the road. He opened the door of the little red Mustang, leaned out and threw up.
He didn’t tell Martha that part. When he did stop talking, he waited for a barrage of questions that didn’t come. She didn’t ask him where he was going to get the money. She just stared at him with a look he couldn’t read, then got up, stepped behind the desk and put her arm around his shoulder. Such a display of affection from Martha Gregory was staggering.
“You do what you have to do,” she whispered fiercely. “You make your daddy proud.”
After she left, Seth stared at the spot where the sun was setting, making a hole in the sky for the night. Hours passed. The full moon rose over the knob. Still he sat, wondering if what he was about to do would make his daddy proud.
• • • • •
On the other side of Callison County, that same big, yellow moon cast a checkerboard shadow on Elizabeth Bingham’s front porch where it shone through the lattice of the honeysuckle trellis. The soft eech-eech, eech-eech sound the swing made as she glided back and forth in it was a soothing melody. The Kentucky night seemed gentler, somehow, than evenings on their deck in California. Maybe it was the honeysuckle smell, or the aroma of the jonquils and gladiolas that lined the porch steps. Or the scent of the giant rose bushes under the window, so laden with blossoms the stems bent all the way to the ground.
Or maybe it was just the little breeze that made Elizabeth appreciate the patchwork quilt Ben had brought out and wrapped around her shoulders.
The boy sat opposite her in an ancient spindle rocking chair that “walked.” When you rocked, the chair moved all over the porch. But Elizabeth didn’t tell him; Ben should be allowed to discover that for himself.
It was odd how at home the boy seemed in this town and this house he’d heard about but never seen. His mother certainly hadn’t felt at home here. Years into what Jim Bingham assumed would be a permanent bachelorhood, he’d met a starry-eyed flight attendant 15 years his junior on a plane bound for Los Angeles and the American Press Association Convention. After a whirlwind romance that culminated in a not-well-thought-out marriage, he’d brought his bride home to the county seat of Callison County, Kentucky. To Brewster, population 8,000, counting the dogs and chickens, a sleepy southern town of tree-lined streets where large Catholic families raised broods of rowdy kids in big old houses with wraparound porches. And where a collection of clapboard shacks out by the fairgrounds housed filthy, barefoot children who played in dirt yards littered with the carcasses of dead appliances and dismembered automobiles.
Oh, the good citizens of Brewster pretended those people didn’t exist, of course. And Allison felt like she didn’t exist either in a town where relationships dated back generations. She hadn’t been there a week before she hated everything about it. If she hadn’t gotten pregnant, Allison wouldn’t have lasted six months in Callison County; for her daughter’s sake, she stuck it out for 12 years. But when Elizabeth was in the seventh grade, her mother finally threw in the towel, filed for divorce and took Elizabeth back home with her to Los Angeles, to the big city with its culture, art, music, fine dining, and stores that stayed open past five o’clock in the afternoon.
In short order, Allison met and married Craig Malone, the defensive line coach for the USC Trojans, and Elizabeth grew up at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. But she spent every summer in Kentucky with her father. Jim took her hunting, fishing and hiking in the knobs. She tagged along with him when his police scanner sent him dashing out in the middle of the night to cover a fire, a flood or a wreck. He taught her how to develop film, print pictures, design and lay out a weekly newspaper, imparting to his only child his fierce love of journalism. He didn’t have to teach his daughter to love Callison County, though. She enjoyed California; but Brewster, Kentucky, owned her heart.
One day toward the end of Elizabeth’s senior year in high school, Allison had sent her to the store for chocolate ice cream, then casually added, “And bring back some pickles, too, the big sour kind.”
“Pickles and ice cream, yuk!” Elizabeth teased, “You sound like you’re pregnant.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, I am.”
The 18-year-old stared at her mother wide-eyed, then blurted out the first thought that came into her head. “You have sex at your age?”
Like many late-in-life babies, Ben had been an absolute delight. Doted on by his parents and big sister, he grew to be a bright, winsome young man with his father’s athletic skill and his mother’s freckles and flaming red hair.
But when Ben was 10 years old, Craig and Allison were killed in a five-car pile-up on the freeway. Elizabeth folded the shattered, frightened child into her arms, her heart and her life. Oh, they’d had their moments in the past six years, but they were remarkably close.
It was the closeness that planted such concern on the boy’s face now, the pinched look that was becoming a permanent visage. Elizabeth sighed. She couldn’t do anything about that, had no control over any of the events that had turned her life and her world wrong side out.
“You want some iced tea?” he asked. Ben was intrigued by the sweet tea of the South. Did they put a whole cup of sugar in there? “Or something to eat?”
The kitchen in her father’s rambling, two-story house was jammed with food, the aroma of it drifting out to the porch, luring, tempting, enticing—if you could stand the thought of food, that is. The neighbors had been bringing in covered dishes all day like ants storing up provisions for winter, more food than the two of them could eat in a month.
“Sit still, Ben. This afternoon was a fluke. I’m fine.” Of course, she wasn’t fine. On any level. Three days ago, she’d found out her father had been murdered. And three weeks ago she’d found out she had MS.
Multiple Sclerosis. The mystery disease. The pull-the-arm-on-the-MS-slot-machine-and-see-what-symptoms-line-up-today disease. The migraine headache, dizziness, weird pain, can’t walk, debilitating fatigue disease. The doctor she saw in Singapore who’d confirmed the MS diagnosis had been worth the trip if for nothing other than his candor. MS doesn’t have a cause. It doesn’t have a cure. We can’t treat it and we don’t know what it will do to you. You could lead a normal life; you could be bedridden in six months, so crippled you never get out of a wheelchair again.
Industrial-strength honesty, truth in a hospital gown with the strings undone.
The symptoms that sent her seeking medical help had been all over the map, just like the symptoms of everybody else with the disease, she was finding out. She’d spent six months in agony. A dagger-in-the-eardrum pain stalked her night and day. Doctors couldn’t find a thing wrong with her ears. Her fingers went numb, the rest of her body tingled. Doctors said her neurological system was perfectly normal. She couldn’t see properly. It was like she was looking at the world through Saran Wrap. Her ophthalmologist in
formed her it wasn’t Saran Wrap that was distorting her vision, it was her imagination. By the time the best medical minds in California finally started batting around the MS diagnosis, Elizabeth was beyond caring.
Call it whatever you want; just tell me what’s wrong with me and what I can do about it.
She finally got half of what she wanted.
Then, right before her trip to Singapore, the symptoms vanished as surely as if they’d never been there at all. Well, not all of them. But, by then, the Saran-Wrap vision had become so normal Elizabeth would have been surprised to see the world any other way.
Doctors told her there was no such thing as a “remission” in the disease that attacked the lining around the nerves. But it was not uncommon for patients to go months, sometimes years, with only a few mild symptoms.
Hey, if it looks like a remission and quacks like a remission …
There was no way to predict how long her “not-remission” would last, of course. A week? A decade? She had been trying to get her arms around the uncertainty of all that when the phone rang and she heard Aunt Clara’s bird-squeak voice sobbing on the other end of the line.
“Sis, I’ve been wondering about something.” Ben was rocking back and forth, lost in thought. He hadn’t yet noticed that his chair was about to fall off the porch steps. “Maybe this isn’t the best time to bring it up, but we’re here now and we’ll be leaving in a couple of days, so I just thought …”
When he’d cowered at the end of the high diving board at age 7, trying to work up the nerve to jump off, his face had looked a lot like it looked right now.
“Spit it out, Ben.”
“What are you going to do about your job?”
Oh yes, her teaching job at USC, where she’d used up all her sick leave and vacation time, and where she’d have to go in sometime soon and inform the dean of the School of Journalism that she couldn’t guarantee from one day to the next whether or not she’d be well enough to work. That would be just the excuse the ugly old troll had been waiting for; he’d fire her on the spot.
“You know what the doctor told you about stress.”
“Yeah—don’t!” Stress brought on MS symptoms when they weren’t there and made symptoms worse when they were.
“Don’t you think you’d do better with a slower-paced lifestyle, working fewer hours?”
“Well, sure, but I don’t see what that has to do with—” All of a sudden, it hit her where Ben was going with all this.
“Here?” she looked at him incredulously. “You think Brewster would be, that I’d be better off if—”
“I think it’s something you ought to think about. I can finish high school anywhere. It doesn’t matter at all to me.”
Yes, it did! Ben was the star wide receiver on the Monterey High School football team and he’d be a senior this fall. He had friends, a life. It had to matter to him.
“Your father’s newspaper, it’s yours now, isn’t it? You inherited it, didn’t you?”
Until that moment, Elizabeth hadn’t given so much as a nanosecond of thought to The Callison County Tribune. But Ben was right. It was hers now.
“Running a weekly newspaper in a small town would be a lot less stress than working for Darth Vader.”
That was Ben’s nickname for the dean, partly because the old man had a raspy, breathy voice, but mostly because he was the heartless enforcer for the Evil Empire of academia that ran the journalism school. Without tenure, Elizabeth was the man’s helpless slave and he never missed an opportunity to treat her like one.
“If you’re the boss, who can complain if sometimes you don’t show up for work?”
“Aren’t you forgetting one little bitty detail? I’ve never run a newspaper, never even worked at one except as a college intern. And there’s a reason for that. Those who—”
“I know, I know.” Then Ben mimicked in a sing-song whine, “‘Those who can’t do, teach.’ But how do you know you can’t do it? You’ve never tried.”
Elizabeth didn’t have the energy to argue with him. She was too tired. She didn’t know if her debilitating exhaustion was jetlag and no sleep for three days or an MS relapse. At this point, it didn’t matter much one way or the other. “I just can’t think about that right now, Ben. Maybe tomorrow … ”
Tomorrow was her father’s funeral. Her father, who’d been murdered. She put her head in her hands and Ben got up from the rocker, crossed the porch and sat down in the swing beside her. She knew her little brother understood what she was going through; he’d lost his own father. And Ben was grieving for her father, too. Jim Bingham had been like a grandfather to the boy whenever he visited them in California.
Ben put his arm wordlessly around Elizabeth’s shoulders and held her while she cried.
Chapter 5
It was the tail end of August, almost two months after Jim Bing-ham’s funeral, with the sun blazing overhead so hot it bleached the blue right out of the sky.
Billy Joe climbed to the top section of rails in the front of an old tobacco barn and carefully inspected the roof to see if it needed patching. The barn was located on the back side of a farm that had been in foreclosure for more than a year, though the land looked like it hadn’t been farmed in a decade. The fields had grown up in weeds, brambles had reclaimed the fence line and the two remaining out-buildings, a tool shed with a hole in the roof and this tobacco barn, lay hidden behind overgrown bushes and brush.
Billy Joe’d had a hard time finding the barn, but the road was good enough once you located it. He wouldn’t have any trouble getting trucks back in here.
Yep, this looked like a real good place to house this year’s marijuana crop.
Billy Joe smiled when he thought about his high school English teacher, a clueless Yankee who’d maintained haughtily that “house” was a noun, not a verb.
“You cannot house (rhymed with mouse) tobacco!” she’d said.
Of course you could, too, house tobacco. Happened every summer in barns all over Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia and the Carolinas. To house tobacco meant to hang it up in a barn to dry.
In tobacco-growing states, farmers usually hauled their ripe burley tobacco into the barn on poles in late August, the huge leaves bright yellow and malleable. After a couple of months in the barn, the leaves dried and turned brown and the farmers stripped them off the stems by hand and bailed the leaves to be sold at auction.
Kentucky’d shot to the top of the domestic marijuana production industry in large part because growing dope was so much like growing tobacco. Just about every farmer in the state knew how, had the right kind of equipment to plant and harvest it and proper barns to hang it in to dry.
Billy Joe was out looking for a new barn because he liked to switch sites as often as he could. The first few years he grew dope, he’d mixed it in with his own tobacco to dry. But that was dangerous business. You could claim you didn’t know somebody was raising dope on your farm, way on the back side where you couldn’t see it. But it was a sight harder to convince a jury you didn’t know there was marijuana hanging in your barn right alongside your own burley.
Billy Joe climbed down from the top rail and got on his hands and knees in the dirt on the barn floor, checking for any sign that there’d ever been dope here. It wouldn’t do to decide to hang his crop in the same barn some other doper had already staked out to hang his.
He’d already had trouble with other dopers and the problems were escalating. Every year, it got worse as more farmers tried to cash in on the easy money, men Billy Joe called “five-plant dopers” who couldn’t tell sinsemilla from crabgrass. They didn’t know how to grow good weed so they were always out in the woods looking to come across quality stuff somebody else was raising. They’d steal it if they could, destroy it if they couldn’t steal it, or set the police on the location with an “anonymous tip” just for spite.
Violence was commonplace. Bubba shot a man he caught in his dope field last summer, shot him dead! At least that�
��s what Billy Joe heard, that Bubba’d buried the guy up a hollow somewhere wouldn’t nobody ever find his body. Gave Billy Joe the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it.
A lot of amateurs ended up getting caught, which was both the good news and the bad news. Good news because while the DEA, the federal Drug Task Force, the Kentucky State Police and the Callison County Sheriff’s Department were chasing those guys, they were too busy to look for Billy Joe. And busting a herd of amateur dopers every summer made the law think they were actually getting somewhere in their war against the marijuana industry.
The bad news was that every bust drew more attention to Callison County and the spotlight shone brighter every year.
Billy Joe walked to the far end of the barn to check out the high rails there. Last spring, he’d been in a barn near Cade’s Crossing showing some of Bubba’s nubies the ropes when an old beam broke and almost spilled him down 20 feet to the barn floor.
He still found it hard to believe Bubba wanted him to talk out loud in front of strangers about how to grow dope. Who were those guys, anyway? But you didn’t tell Bubba Jamison you didn’t want to do whatever it was he’d told you to do. Not if you valued your front teeth.
Though Bubba maintained Billy Joe raised the best weed in Kentucky, there’d been a red-faced, pot-bellied man in the barn that day who didn’t seem much impressed by his expertise. The others had come to learn but that fool kept butting in.
“In a whole lot of ways dope’s easier to grow than burley,” Billy Joe had started out. He was nervous and fidgety and hoped they couldn’t see it. “Dope’s a weed. It’ll just about grow in spite of you. You can plant seeds, or you can plant the seeds in grow-boxes and transplant the seedlings, somewhere they can get a minimum of eight hours of sun a day. The plants need to be at least 3 feet apart, in different spots up against a fence line, or in between row crops. They just need to be random, so the color green doesn’t look like a pattern from above.”
“I thought you could rig a tobacco setter so’s you could plant dope with it,” the fool said.
