Rock of Ages

by Howard Owen

  Georgia tells her that all she knows is that Wade Hairr didn’t remember seeing a ring, and neither did anyone else between the pond and the morgue.

  “Well,” the older woman says, “like I told you, she was so crippled with that arthritis. She might have just not worn it that day.”

  “Wade Hairr said he would ask about it, ask the Blackwell boy.”

  “And has he?”

  So Georgia does what she didn’t really plan to do. She tells her old teacher about Pooh’s visit. When she is through, she finds that she is shaking. Forsythia leans against her car, looks up at her and frowns.

  “I probably ought not to say this, but that one scares me. He gets an idea in his head, and it seems as if he can’t get it out.

  “I remember, must have been four or five years ago, he thought one of the Gibbs boys had cheated him in some kind of business deal, the kind of thing the Blackwells are usually involved in. You know, two cats for a dog, or some such. I don’t even know all the details, but he beat that boy so bad he had to go to the hospital. I think he moved away from here not long after he got out. I knew that boy. There wasn’t a bit of meanness or dishonesty in him. It was all in Pooh’s head.”

  “Well, I wish I could get this particular idea out of his head. The last thing in the world I want to do is make enemies around here.”

  Forsythia rises up from the car.

  “You know, I guess I’ve taught just about everybody between Pooh’s age and 65 who grew up around here. You teach elementary school, you see them for seven years. It wasn’t that big a school. And you can’t help but have impressions. After a while, you can get a good idea, just from remembering their older brothers and sisters and observing their parents, and from seeing them grow up, how they’re going to turn out.

  “Some of them, it just seems like they were born a certain way, and they are bound for a certain fate, and about all you can do is try to alter their course a little. You don’t give up on them, but you know pretty much how it’s all going to turn out. It can be a terrible thing, teaching at one school that long.”

  Georgia smiles a little.

  “So, how did you think I was going to turn out?”

  The older woman gives her an inscrutable look.

  “Well, I guess you turned out about the way I figured. Thought you’d move away and not come back, thought you might have become a writer. Didn’t think you’d get married three times, but who can predict that?”

  Who indeed, Georgia thinks.

  The older woman opens her car door, then turns stiffly around to face Georgia again.

  “We’re glad you came back, though,” she says, dispensing a small smile. “And we’re glad to have some young people here, too. Bring them with you next time.”

  “Yeah,” Georgia says, shaking her head. “Maybe they’ll even get married here. Maybe they’ll get married somewhere, I hope.”

  “Don’t worry about that, now. They’ll either get married or they won’t. You can’t bully them into it.”

  “It’s just that I never imagined that my first grandchild would be born out of wedlock.”

  Forsythia frowns as she turns to go.

  “It’ll work out,” she says. “It’ll work out. And the baby will be loved, I can tell that. That’s what counts.”

  Georgia phones Kenny, but no one answers. When she walks over, his car is gone.

  Justin and Leeza don’t return until after 3. They’ve been visiting the Geddies, they tell Georgia, who is getting ready to skewer them for leaving her at home alone.

  “We told you that,” he reminds her. “We told you last week that I’d finally gone to see Blue, and how we were going to their church today. Remember? We left a little early to run by that 24-hour drugstore in Port Campbell and get some things for Leeza.”

  Georgia pretends not to recall. She knows she probably would have declined if they’d asked her to join them. The AME Zion services, everyone knew, were interminable. Spirited, but interminable.

  “Their church was so neat,” Leeza says, as enthusiastic as Georgia has seen her lately, her belly so obscenely large that Georgia can’t believe she’s been up and about all morning and half the afternoon. “They sang, and got excited and clapped their hands. It wasn’t like any church I’ve ever been to.”

  I’ll bet not, Georgia thinks but does not say. She wishes she could infuse the good people of Geddie Presbyterian with some of the black church’s spirit.

  “Well,” she says, looking for something to complain about, “why didn’t you wake me up? I might have come with you.”

  “You looked like you could use the sleep,” Justin said, “after last night and all.”

  “So,” Georgia asks, “how is Blue? And his mother—Annabelle?”

  Blue is married; he and Sherita have a boy and a girl. They and his mother live on opposite sides of Littlejohn McCain Road, in matching double-wides.

  “And what was the other one’s name—Godfrey?”

  “Winfrey. Ah, he’s in prison. Drugs, I think. He’s supposed to get out next summer, Blue said.”

  “That’s too bad. About him being in prison, I mean. Not the getting-out part.”

  She remembers learning about the wreck when she got to East Geddie to pick up Justin and take him back to Montclair that summer. She just assumed, her primitive brain overriding 22 years of sensitivity training, that the two black kids with her son had been the cause of it. Looking at her son’s broken nose and scars, she was raving about pressing charges, but her father talked her out of it. On the way back home, Justin told her about the marijuana he’d provided and the damage he had done, and Georgia then understood the part of Littlejohn McCain’s will that left 150 acres of prime farmland to an African-American family she barely knew.

  She asks Justin if Blue walks with a limp. She is embarrassed that she hasn’t been to see them herself, but she salves her conscience by remembering that they haven’t visited her, either.

  “Just a little,” Justin says. “I wasn’t even going to say anything about it, but he brought it up. It’s funny. He said he thought that wreck was the luckiest thing that had ever happened to him. He said it made him grow up, forget about playing basketball and focus on something.”

  Winfrey, he tells her, did become a big high school basketball star, just as both of them dreamed they’d be, and he even played a year or two at Pembroke, but then he just drifted, never graduated.

  “But you know,” Justin says, “there’s still hard feelings about the land, between Kenny and the Geddies. It’s too bad. I mean, they live right beside each other and all, and they barely speak.”

  Georgia knows the basics, as told to her by Kenny and various other old acquaintances who talk of it obliquely, deftly dodging direct inquiries.

  It seems obvious to her that her father meant to give some of the very best land to Blue and his mother. The land reaching over toward the Blue Sandhills was where he himself had made much of what money he made farming. It had never been planted in tobacco, and the berries and melons and cantaloupes they raised down in the bottomland flourished.

  The interstate was foreseen before Littlejohn died, but the final route had not been determined. Those plans were announced within a year of his passing.

  The road they finally built took away a few acres of the best land and more or less ruined a dozen more, cut off now from the rest of the farm by the raised highway.

  In the meanwhile, Kenny had traded three acres of his land south of the still-rut road to the Geddies in exchange for three acres on the north side that included the Rock of Ages, where he would build his home.

  It hadn’t seemed important at the time. Nobody had any problems with it. They didn’t even call in a lawyer, just wrote it out on a piece of paper and got it notarized. They sealed the deal with a handshake.

  But then, after they became aware that they would soon be losing almost 20 acres of prime berry land—the money they received for it didn’t come close to equaling it
s long-term value—Blue and his mother came to Kenny Locklear one day and told him they had changed their minds, that they were going to need that good land where Kenny had already laid the footings for his new brick rancher.

  It was a mess, everyone agreed. Kenny’s dream was to build within eyesight of the old Indian rock, to actually own the land on which it sat. Blue and Annabelle suspected Kenny had known all along that they were going to be losing a valuable little triangle of their land to the new highway.

  What really tore it was when, on the occasion of their second meeting, Kenny said he didn’t think they should renege on the deal they’d already made.

  Neither Blue nor Annabelle were familiar with that verb, but they sure as hell knew what it sounded like.

  “You can’t talk to me like that,” Blue had said, and the two of them walked out on a startled Kenny, who became aware later and second-hand of the faux pas he had committed.

  He came to them and tried to explain, but then, when it seemed as if they weren’t in the mood to listen, he became exasperated and angry, and he wound up storming out of their tarpaper home that the double-wides soon would replace.

  The lawyer Blue threatened to bring in never materialized, and so the feud just festered, fed by crowds of Lumbees who sometimes parked on Annabelle and Blue’s land when they came to see the rock, and by friends of Blue’s who were prone to throw their empty beer cans into Kenny’s yard as they drove by.

  In general, though, it has been a quiet grudge, gradually receding. They don’t actively hate or even harass each other. Kenny admonishes his visitors to respect the Geddies’ property, and Blue tells his friends not to be throwing their trash in his neighbor’s yard.

  The old scar, though, has not completely healed.

  Kenny says the Geddies have made a pretty good living off what’s left of their inheritance, and he can’t be blamed if they pissed away the right-of-way money, mostly on things they bought for their worthless relatives.

  “But we’re going to try to get them together,” Leeza says.

  “Well, we hope maybe we can,” Justin says, looking more doubtful. “We had this idea.”

  “What?” Georgia asks.

  But her son doesn’t want to say.

  “It’s kind of half-baked, and I’d rather wait and see if we can do it or not.”

  Georgia is determined not to press him, not to be overbearing. She even understands her son’s reluctance. She knows she is prone to throw cold water on youthful dreams.

  She is sure he will tell her eventually. He’s never been able to keep a secret for long.

  “Oh,” Leeza says, “and Annabelle—that’s what she wants me to call her—is going to teach me how to make biscuits, from scratch.”

  Well, Georgia thinks, that shouldn’t be much harder than beef Wellington. She herself never really gained the knack for making biscuits. Her mother, an orphan reared by an older couple, had barely known how to do it. Her father actually was the family biscuit-maker.

  It was not something the future collegian and world-traveler dreamed of doing—making the perfect buttermilk biscuit. It was one of those skills that was highly treasured around East Geddie but did not travel well.

  She had tried, though, attempting in vain to turn self-rising flour, shortening, a pinch of baking soda and buttermilk into something light as air and capable of absorbing twice its weight in molasses. Hers usually bear a depressing resemblance, in shape and heft, to hockey pucks.

  “Well,” Georgia says, “that ought to be interesting. That’s no easy feat, making them from scratch. I’m looking forward to you learning that trick. I haven’t had a good scratch biscuit since homecoming at the church.”

  “She spent about an hour showing me how,” Leeza says, and Georgia notices the smudges of flour around the parts of her an apron would not have covered. “She’s a nice lady.”

  As opposed, Georgia is sure she is thinking, to the mean asshole who keeps busting my chops every time I do something wrong around here.

  Just then, Georgia detects a flash of movement and turns to the window to see Kenny’s car coming down the road.

  “Oh, good,” she says, glad for the excuse. “Kenny’s home. I wanted to go over and talk to him about last night.”

  They haven’t mentioned it until now. Georgia finds that it embarrasses her, makes her blame herself for somehow letting such ugliness burst into their lives. Justin, she’s sure, feels the same helplessness she does in the face of such black and unassailable rage.

  She goes to get her coat, telling them she will be back in a few minutes.

  “Want us to come with you?” Justin asks.

  “No, that’s OK. You all can just, ah, practice making biscuits or something.”

  She doesn’t know why she said that, and she leaves before anyone can accuse her of meanness or sarcasm.

  Kenny is getting ready to wash his car, an old Nissan that seems not to fit what Georgia imagines as his mid-life single-male lifestyle.

  “Hi,” she says, coming up behind him as he is bending to turn the hose on. “I called earlier, but you weren’t here.”

  He turns and nods, squinting into the afternoon sun. He shuts the water off again and wipes his hands on the sides of his jeans. He is still a handsome man, Georgia thinks, really seeing him now. Her image of him, imprinted long ago, seems to need updating. There is more substance there, or maybe it was there all along and she didn’t notice. It helps that he talks occasionally now and seems more comfortable in her presence. She used to think that she scared him, and he certainly disconcerted her.

  She is relatively certain that Kenny is her never-known half-brother’s son, issue of Littlejohn McCain and the dark and beautiful Rose Lockamy Locklear. Despite this, she wonders if she hasn’t consigned him, all this time, to the general subset of “Lumbee,” as if he were of a different species altogether.

  He is tan and fit from making his living at least partially with his muscles, but he isn’t worn out the way Georgia remembers the old-time farmers, who worked like the mules with which they ploughed and were heavy on sweat, light on knowledge. Any of the latter that had come from books instead of being passed on, right or wrong, from father to son was viewed with scepticism.

  He offers no explanation for his absence today.

  “I figured maybe you just had a hot date last night and didn’t make it home,” she says, trying to make it into a joke.

  He shakes his head.

  “I had a hot date all right,” he says. “Tommy.”

  She knew that he had custody of the boy one day a week, plus two weeks in the summer, when they go on vacation together. She’s never seen Tommy, though, and tends to forget that Kenny has a son. All she knows about him is that he is supposed to have some kind of developmental problem.

  Kenny usually likes to make his day with his son either Saturday or Sunday. The boy is inside now, watching television.

  “Why don’t you ever bring him over to see us?” she asks. “I’d love to meet him.”

  “Maybe I will sometime,” Kenny says. “Maybe I will.”

  Georgia thanks him again for saving her, thinking as she says it what an old-fashioned, non-feminist notion that is. Nevertheless, he did. So there.

  “I’ve got something I want you to have,” he tells her, a hesitant tone in his voice. “I hope you won’t just dismiss it out of hand.”

  He goes to the trunk and brings it out, so small it might be a child’s toy, ready to squirt water on her. He hands it to Georgia, who has never held a gun before. She stares at it and wants to hand it back but is afraid of offending Kenny.

  “I know it’s not your style,” he says, holding his hands up to ward off the argument, “and everything will probably just smooth over, water over the dam. But it’s never a bad idea just to have one around.”

  He tells her it’s called a Ladysmith, chauvinistically small, tiny enough to fit into a purse. It only weighs about a pound and a half empty, he tells her, but it fee
ls heavier, as if its serious intent adds to its bulk.

  “I … I can’t,” she says, thinking what a betrayal this would be of every word she’s ever uttered or written against an out-of-control gun culture. “I’d probably wind up shooting myself.”

  “Bull,” he says, and, taking the gun from her, motions her to come with him.

  Across the collard patch behind the barn is a lone pine tree, and on the tree is a target. Georgia has heard what she thought were gunshots occasionally across the field, and she guesses, from the Swiss-cheese condition of the paper, that this is where they came from.

  He gives her the gun. His hands are rough but warm.

  “Now, just aim it. Take in a breath, then let it halfway out, and pull.”

  She does it, with him helping steady her arms from behind. She closes her eyes in anticipation of the sound, which is not as loud as she had feared. She is surprised that there is not more kick. She has actually, Kenny tells her, hit the edge of the target 30 feet away.

  “You’d be using this a lot closer than that if—God forbid—you ever had to,” he tells her. “Here. Try again.”

  She shoots at the target 20 times and is ashamed at how good, how empowered she feels. When she has used up what ammunition Kenny brought with him, she tries to give it back again.

  “Nope. It’s yours.”

  She doesn’t argue, for now.

  “Well, what do I owe you?”

  “You don’t owe me anything. A man owed me something, and I had him pay me back.”

  He shows her how to load it.

  “Eight rounds, no safety. Just keep pulling the trigger. And don’t worry. It won’t go off if you drop it or something.”

  She can imagine the small, serious piece of metal falling to the floor and discharging as she reaches for her offering money at church.

  “I’m never going to use this,” she tells him.

  “You already have. Just remember how easy it is, for better or worse. Bad things don’t always happen, Georgia, but they can happen, and it doesn’t hurt to be prepared.”

  “Like a Boy Scout.”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  She asks him if she can talk to him about Pooh, and about Jenny McLaurin’s ring.