Rock of Ages

by Howard Owen

  “You’re on our land now,” Harold told him. “You’d best be going. You go on and sic your daddy on us, if you want, but I don’t expect it’ll be worth it. I don’t think he’s a good enough lawyer to get that ring back, do you?”

  He’d moved very close to the young lawyer, almost but not quite touching him. The other man backed away.

  He promised that Harold hadn’t heard the last of it, but Harold knew he had.

  The next week, he gave the ring to Jenny, who would have married him anyway.

  “So,” Georgia says, “the ring always meant a lot. Somebody would always bring that story up, although I don’t think Jenny liked to tell it as much as Harold did.”

  “I expect not.”

  “But I don’t remember seeing it, and nobody from the sheriff’s department or at the funeral home mentioned anything about a ring being on her hand. Did they to you?”

  “No.”

  “And you were the one that found her? They said you identified her.”

  “I identified her, but I wasn’t the first one there.”

  “You weren’t?” Georgia wonders how it is that no one told her that before.

  “No. I thought you knew. It was that big fat boy of William Blackwell’s, the one they call Pooh. He came knocking on my door, all out of breath—which wouldn’t have taken much—and said ‘Miss Jenny has drownded.’”

  “So, he found her.”

  “Yes. They did come by once every blue moon, to keep her from changing the will, if nothing else. I called the rescue squad and went out with him, and there she was. By the time I got out there, he had managed to snag her dress, I suppose, with a stick and dragged her to the edge of the pond …”

  Forsythia Crumpler stops and pulls out a Kleenex.

  “I just feel terrible about not checking on her after church. I just assumed she didn’t feel like coming to services that morning. Sometimes she didn’t.”

  “Well, the coroner said she’d been dead several hours. There wasn’t anything you could have done.”

  Then Georgia tells her about the jewelry box she inherited, how it occurred to her that the ring might be in there, but it wasn’t.

  The older woman frowns and is silent for a few seconds before speaking.

  “Yes. Goodness, I hadn’t thought about the ring. She was very fond of it. I remember she told me once, must have been two or three years ago, that sometimes her hands swelled so much from the arthritis that she couldn’t wear it. She said she took it off at bedtime every night and then would see the next morning whether that was going to be a ‘ring day’ or not.

  “Maybe she put it in a safety deposit box.”

  “There’s no record of her or Harold having one, at least not with their bank. I checked. You know, Mrs. Crumpler, I don’t care about that ring, for me. I hope you know that. Daddy left us more than we deserve. But it’s just eating at me that it’s disappeared. She loved that ring. She wouldn’t have been careless with it.”

  Forsythia Crumpler nods and then frowns.

  “Well, if it wasn’t on her finger and it wasn’t in her jewelry box …”

  Exactly, Georgia thinks. Exactly.

  When she gets back to the house, she calls the sheriff’s office, where a secretary tells her Sheriff Hairr is busy “presently” but will call her back “directly.”

  She only has to wait 15 minutes. Apparently, old classmates do get some special treatment.

  “Thank you for returning my call so soon, Wade, uh, Sheriff. Sorry.”

  “Not a problem, Georgia.” He has his sheriff’s voice on, a mix of Gary Cooper and Buford Pusser. “What can I do for you?”

  She tells him about the ring, asks him if anybody recalled seeing one on Jenny’s finger or anywhere else, either at the pond or in the rescue vehicle or at the mortuary.

  “Well,” he says, after a pause, “now that you mention it, I don’t think anybody said anything about a ring, and I sure don’t remember seeing one. What kind was it? I mean, how big was it?”

  Two carats, Georgia tells him.

  He whistles.

  “Well,” he says, “there are some folks around here who are full of meanness, I won’t argue that point, but I can’t imagine somebody stealing a wedding ring off a drowned woman’s finger.… no offense.”

  “And I understand Pooh Blackwell, William’s boy, was the first one to find her.”

  “That’s the way I heard it.”

  “And he didn’t see any sign of it, either?”

  “Not that I know of. I can ask him.”

  “Would you?”

  “No problem. You know, he’s just about completely moved into Jenny’s place. Saw him the other day, burning some stuff out back. Had to remind him to get a fire permit.”

  Georgia thanks Wade Hairr again and hangs up.

  Just then, Justin and Leeza come in.

  “They say it might be a Christmas baby,” Leeza says, her excitement evident.

  “Wouldn’t that be something?” Georgia says, still preoccupied. She sees Justin looking at her the way she used to look at him when she would catch him picking his nose in public.

  “That’s really great,” she says. “Christmas. Wouldn’t that be amazing?” She flounders around for something that will show interest in her first grandchild. She really does care, but she’s a little distracted right now.

  “Ah, have you decided on a name yet?”

  Another sore point. After they told her they wanted to be surprised, didn’t want to know what the baby’s sex would be, they’d also given her their list of boys’ and girls’ names. One of the female names had been Alysyn. Another had been Maree.

  Georgia had looked at the list of names and could not stop herself from remarking that a girl bearing either of those names was going to spend a lot of her life spelling it out.

  “Like Leeza with a ‘z’?” Leeza had said.

  Leeza tells her that they have pared the boys’ names down to Gregg (“Three g’s,” Justin says, daring his mother to challenge it) and Mack. “Just Mack?” Georgia wants to say, but doesn’t. One small step for diplomacy.

  CHAPTER NINE

  November 13

  It might have been better, a couple of people suggest gently, to have had the yard sale in October, before the weather turned.

  The few bargain hunters who have come are walking around the big table on the screened back porch, their only refuge from a drenching, bone-chilling rain that has hammered the tin roof since before dawn. Georgia, Justin, and Kenny have crammed the hallway and one of the back bedrooms with things that should have been sitting in bright sunlight.

  The would-be buyers are as cautious as if they were assaying diamonds. They carefully evaluate mismatched plates and glasses, pots and pans of every size, and a large variety of tables and chairs no one has yet chosen to steal. There are three beds there, a lifetime supply of mason jars that never got refilled with grape preserves or apple jelly, and a thousand knickknacks of unknown origin.

  Georgia has left untagged only what the three of them need until someone buys the place and she can concentrate on the future. Whatever the hell that might be.

  She has to rescue the dresser filled with Jenny’s letters and photographs. It is as worthless as the rest, and uglier than most, but Georgia has no intention of getting rid of it, at least not for now. She makes Justin and Kenny haul it back into her room.

  The two men are spending most of their time in the old two-car garage, where the tools are. She let Kenny take some of them, but there are plenty left—axes, chisels, hammers, levels, manual drills, screwdrivers, a baffling variety of saws. She was struck, walking through last night, with how sufficient her father and his parents before them had to be. There were tools enough there, she saw, to build a house, and some probably were used to build this one. She is surprised that so few of them were stolen by a long line of tenants. Probably, like her, they had no clue what to do with most of them, and no inclination had they known.


  The yard sale goes better than she might have expected, considering the weather. A few sharpies show up a full hour before it is supposed to start and walk away with a couple of hundred dollars worth, mostly tools. The people who come when they are supposed to, at 8, take care of another 500 dollars or so. At the end of the day, the final sharpie, what Justin called the closer sharpie, comes by and offers 150 dollars for the majority of what is left.

  “Pretty good,” Kenny says, when he’s counting it up. All of them, including Leeza, are sitting in the living room, exhausted. “More than eight hundred and fifty dollars. That’s a good haul for a yard sale around here.”

  Georgia is thinking that, after a couple of centuries of McCains accumulating things in East Geddie, the final tally comes out to a little over four dollars a year. But she keeps such depressing thoughts to herself. She is delighted, really, to see the stuff hauled away. What she needs to remind her of her father and mother, she already has.

  Alberta Horne and Minnie McCauley and some of the other church ladies come by, and all of them shake their heads in sadness to see the last of Littlejohn and Sarah McCain’s worldly possessions (other than the house itself, of course) going off in bits and pieces. It doesn’t keep them from buying a collander, a set of glasses and an iron wash pot at half the asking price.

  The house itself seems to be less desirable than the items inside it. It is on the wrong side of town, away from the hills and hardwoods that draw most of the Scots County population that can choose where it lives. Despite what they’ve done to modernize it, it is still an old, wooden house with a lush piece of land around it and a decent view.

  The real-estate agent says she’s committed to selling it, but Georgia wonders.

  “We just have to find that right person,” the agent says, as if she is running a dating service.

  The ad doesn’t run in the Port Campbell Post any more, because it was more efficient to run it in the free publication the realtors themselves put out.

  “Cheaper, she means,” Kenny said when he heard that.

  The agent’s contract runs out in early December. Maybe, Georgia says, she’ll change agents if she hasn’t sold it by then.

  “Maybe,” she says now, “we’re asking too much. A hundred and twenty thousand might be too much for the market.”

  “Damn the market,” Kenny says, surprising her with the heat he brings to the subject. “This place is a steal for $120,000. Don’t let anybody beat you down on that price. Besides, if you drop it ten thousand, some wise-ass will come in here and think he can get it for even less. Tell ’em all to go to hell.”

  “Well,” she says, “you know, Kenny, we might have a little better luck if we didn’t have to check the wind direction every time somebody came out to look at it.”

  Kenny is quiet.

  On a day like this, with the clouds suffocatingly close and the air thick with mist and fog, you can smell the hogs, even indoors. Everyone tells Georgia she’ll get used to them. Justin and Leeza seem to have; at least, they don’t complain. Georgia will forget about them for several crisp, clear days, and then she’ll wake up as she did this morning and think she’s choking.

  One of Georgia’s least favorite childhood experiences was hog-killing. Everyone on the farm and whatever help they could lure in from outside would spend a cold, windy November day turning the McCains’ hogs into bacon, ham, sausage, souse meat, liver pudding, pigs’ feet, fatback, crackling, and other things that nurtured the expression “everything but the oink.”

  In those days, though, a farm family would keep four or five hogs around, enough for meat, even if they had pork three times a day—which they sometimes did. The hog pen itself was always a proper distance from the house and thus not very offensive. Only on that day when the fattest, most luckless hogs were slaughtered did it become an unpleasant part of Georgia’s world. The rest of the time, she just tried to avoid their pen.

  It isn’t so easy now, though. Hog farms have gotten larger, and while John Kennedy Locklear doesn’t own anywhere near the largest hog farm in the county, he has used a small fraction of his 160 acres to house and fatten 500 of them, which are then hauled away to the slaughterhouse.

  The smell of 500 hogs, their containment pond, and the buildings where they are fattened for slaughter is enough to make Georgia’s eyes water when the wind and the clouds are just right.

  It has been like that the last two days. Yesterday, the agent brought a pair of potential buyers out to East Geddie. They were moving down from Akron, Ohio, and thought they could make their money go a little farther if they could forgo hills and hardwoods.

  “My God,” the young woman said. “What the hell is that?”

  The agent had taken the only tack she could take. She couldn’t very well claim she didn’t smell it, too. She was holding a tissue near her nose as they walked up to the house.

  “It’s the smell of money,” she said, daring them to refute it.

  “Well,” said the husband, “I knew money talked, but I wasn’t aware until now that it smelled bad, too.”

  They had been polite enough, showing mild enthusiasm about the house (“It’s so spacious, if we could just knock down a couple of walls.…”), and about the screened porch and the various outbuildings. But the agent knew it was a lost cause, and she told Georgia why.

  When Kenny learned what the agent had said, he told Georgia he was sorry, but that he needed the hogs.

  He hadn’t really wanted to get into the pork business. He’d had a decent tobacco allotment, although he could see the handwriting on the wall there. He made some money off soybeans and even that old standby, cotton. He grew watermelons and cantaloupes, and even some strawberries and blueberries, although Annabelle and Blue’s land is the best for that.

  But, in the end, the hogs were what made it possible for him to keep farming. To Kenny Locklear, hogs didn’t smell like money so much as they smelled like solvency.

  He told Georgia that he could have brought in four times that many hogs, with a little sweet-talking and arm-twisting at the county political level, and the Smithfield people who bought them would be more than happy to help him out there.

  “Well,” Georgia said, “I thank you for that, at least. I can’t imagine what four times that many hogs would smell like. I’m about at the threshold of nausea already.”

  Now, it’s on the table again. It is a dilemma none of them knows how to solve. No one wants to hire lawyers to destroy a friendship.

  “Maybe,” Justin says, “you can advertise for potential buyers with head colds.”

  Kenny has never even liked hogs, and wonders who would have something like a pot-bellied pig from Vietnam or wherever as a pet. He wishes he had a choice.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, taking in Justin and Leeza, too. “I’m sorry that hogs don’t smell so sweet. Hell, I can smell ’em. Blue complains about them, too. Their places are closer to it than yours, even. But the only thing between me and spending the rest of my life leasing land and teaching ag at the high school is those hogs. When you’re back in Virginia, I’ll still be here, grateful as hell to Mr. McCain for giving me this and trying the best way I know to hang on to it.

  “If I lost this farm, Georgia, I’d feel worse than the man in the Bible that squandered all his talents. I’d feel worse than if I’d never had anything at all.”

  For Kenny, it’s a very long speech.

  “OK,” she says, holding up her arms in surrender, “forget it. You’re right. You’ll be here to savor the sweet smell of success long after we’re gone. It’s your call. Somebody’ll buy it.”

  She wishes she was sure of that.

  Georgia hasn’t thought much about Jenny McLaurin’s ring the last couple of days. Getting everything together for the yard sale has commanded most of her attention and energy.

  She is unprepared, when she looks out the window, to see a large red truck, with a cab deep enough for a second row of seats, come to a stop straddling a mud puddle in thei
r side yard. It is so tall that it blocks their view of the garage.

  They don’t get many visitors. Anyone going down this road is likely either going to see Kenny or one of Annabelle and Blue Geddie’s family. Georgia, Justin, and Leeza haven’t been around long enough to have a lot of outside visitors, just a couple of Georgia’s old school friends who never left.

  Even in the fast-approaching, cloud-obscured twilight, she can see that it’s Pooh. When he eases himself down to first the running board and then the ground, the big truck visibly sways to the left. He walks around the pump house, toward the back porch. Hardly anyone comes to the old house’s front entrance.

  Georgia gets up to go to the back door and let him in, but he’s just standing in the sandy yard, looking off into the distance. The rain has stopped, and the sun is making one last feeble effort to break through just before it disappears, imbuing the land and the trees beyond it with a buttery kind of light, both optimistic and mocking.

  Georgia doesn’t even know if he prefers to be called Pooh or not.

  “Ah, would you like to come in?” she asks.

  He doesn’t answer at first, just shakes his head. Then she hears a low, “No, ma’am.”

  She stands there for a few seconds, stymied.

  “Well, what do you want … Pooh?”

  He says nothing else.

  Georgia puts down her drink and walks down the steps into the yard. She is bone-tired and somewhat irritated with the large lump of humanity before her. William Blackwell’s son is an unsettling presence to her, but he is on her turf now, and she wants to know why he is making a tedious day just a little longer.

  In the fading light, he seems even larger than she remembers, perhaps because he’s wearing boots and a baseball cap and she’s wearing the slippers she put on after the last bargain hunter left. His head is wider than it is tall, and wider by far across his jowls than at his cranium. His eyes are squinched little slits above a pug nose and a dentally challenged mouth encircled by a Fu Manchu mustache. His neck does not seem to exist as a neck. His head sits, like a snowman’s, directly atop the larger mass of his body. His arms are like a pair of fat sausages poking out from the gray, armless sweatshirt he’s wearing without a jacket in the 45-degree gloom.