by Rhett DeVane
She squeezed into a single bathroom barely large enough to stand inside and shut the door. The tub and toilet were stained amber from years of mineral-tainted water.
A narrow galley-style kitchen held a deep porcelain sink, a compact electric stove, a small rust-pocked vintage refrigerator, and one countertop with a bank of cabinets overhead. She opened the doors to find an assortment of plates, bowls, cups, and glasses. Nothing matched. Drawers on either side of the sink held flatware and a handful of cooking utensils.
The door to the side of the kitchen led to a screened room. Mary-Esther clasped her hands together. It was like opening a plain brown wrapper to find magic. The oak’s branches cradled the room on three sides, as close to standing in a tree house as she had ever been. Boudreau would love it.
Regardless of the amount of scrubbing needed to make the apartment livable, Mary-Esther vowed to move in as soon as she could give the dust bunnies and roaches notice. She locked the door behind her, creaked back down the stairs, and walked the few feet to the rear door of the Herring’s house. The old man answered her knock.
“I’ll take it, Mr. Herring.”
“Rent’s two hundred dollars, due no later than the fifth of each month. The utilities are on. They’re on our line, so we’ll have to see how much you use. If you go over fifty, I may have to up the rent to cover. It’s not a big place, so it doesn’t take much to run the lights and heat. No smoking. No loud parties.” He jabbed a bony finger for emphasis. “We’re peaceable people, and we don’t abide trouble.”
“I keep to myself, Mr. Herring.” Mary-Esther pulled several twenty-dollar bills from her wallet and handed them over. “Do you have a contract for me to sign?”
“Word pledge is good enough for me.” Eustis Herring extended a gaunt hand. “Give me a month’s notice if you plan to leave.”
Mary-Esther gently shook his hand. “Yes, sir. You got it.”
She walked back to the van wearing a wide smile. She could move in right away. Easy, since she only had a few clothes and one box of belongings. Oh, and a folding chair and a cat. And some rocks. Don’t forget the rocks.
Place to sleep. Place to cook. Place to shower. Roof overhead.
A couch. She had a couch!
Mary-Esther backed out and headed uptown to the Dollar Store for cleaning supplies, toilet paper, and necessities. Next, the grocery store. Then to the campground to retrieve Boudreau and her chair.
Mary-Esther hummed. Sometimes, you actually catch a break.
Chapter Fourteen
Hattie opened the fireplace damper. The night air crackled with the first chill of the season. Perfect! She piled up starter fire sticks, a handful of fat lighter wood—deadfall pine with seams of flammable resin—and several small oak splits. Then she settled onto a padded chair and propped her feet close to the hearth’s warmth, sipped coffee. Sarah Chuntian played on a quilt, building her own little log stack with twigs.
Like her father, Hattie favored the fall. The hardwoods scattered amongst the evergreens showed off in gold, red, and orange; not the brilliant, drive-off-the-road magnificence of the Smoky Mountains farther north, but pleasing all the same. Fall was the time she most remembered her father, Dan Davis, affectionately known as Mr. D by his family and wide circle of friends.
As soon as the first frost drove the rattlesnakes into their winter hidey-holes, Mr. D took Hattie and Bobby on the long walk to check the fences along the periphery of the property. Hattie and her father would rest on the leaf-strewn ground and listen to the music of the woods. The only weapon he carried was a slingshot fashioned from a Y-shaped piece of oak and rubber tubing. They took turns firing acorns into the overhead branches.
Bobby was the one who loved guns. He lived to hunt. As soon as he was old enough to handle a shotgun, he stayed in the woods until darkness, cold, and hunger drove him to the house. Every hunting season, Dan allowed his son one deer kill off the property, plenty to fill the deep freezer with choice cuts of venison. Hunting had its place, her father emphasized. Without thinning their numbers, the whole lot would starve.
You kill it. You eat it. Her father’s mantra.
Once when Hattie asked her father why he didn’t like to hunt, he answered, “I don’t know, Sugar. Reckon I lost the love of killing. One time, I had a big buck lined up in my sights. I was getting ready to squeeze the trigger when he turned and looked right at me with big, brown eyes. I couldn’t shoot him.”
Spring had been her mother’s favorite time of year. Hattie’s mother disliked the drab and dreary cold dampness of winter. It made her joints ache and her spirit sore. Where Hattie and her father energized, Tillie became morose and withdrawn, as if the plunging temperatures challenged her generally rosy outlook.
Hattie smiled. “You would’ve loved your grandmother,” she said to Sarah Chuntian. “She adored springtime. She’d flit around this big old house, cleaning, deep-dusting, and singing until we wanted to choke her silent.”
Sarah looked up, babbled some nonsense syllables. Shammie’s ears perked up.
Funny, how families divided into similar camps. Bobby and Tillie chirped around in the morning in terminally high spirits. Both loved spring and warmth. Both could jabber on and on, without so much as a morning cup of tea.
In the a.m. hours, Hattie and her father growled like bears whose hibernation had been rudely interrupted. Neither made eye contact with another living thing for at least the first thirty minutes after awakening and bumped into walls, chairs, or anything else in their paths.
Hattie wrapped her hands around her cup and dove into the family memories like a deep bag of fine chocolates, savoring each one.
Thank the heavens for chocolate, and for coffee.
As she had since her teens, Hattie drank her favorite addiction hot and black. Back then, mornings on The Hill had followed a pattern. She could hear the family moving about. Her mom was first in the kitchen, humming some inane, chirpy, little song. In a few minutes, the scent of perked coffee sifted into Hattie’s bedroom.
Next, the sound of her brother bounding through the kitchen. The back door slammed when he went out to feed the dogs.
Last, her dad. Hattie heard him mumbling replies to her mom. He’d appear at her bedroom door with blood-spotted pieces of toilet paper stuck to his clean-shaven face. The master of the house, come to evict his daughter from sweet sleep.
One flip of the light switch usually forced Hattie to moan and squint with one eye opened. Some mornings, her father snatched off her covers. As a last resort, he blared big band music, usually Glenn Miller, from a well-placed speaker by her bedroom door. Were other children similarly mistreated?
Hattie would bumble from bed into the bathroom then trail behind her father into the too-bright kitchen. No one spoke to the two grumps. Each person remained with his or her respective dive partner. Perky with perky, crabby with crabby.
What would the family dynamics have been if Sarah had survived? Maybe since Hattie was so much the copy of Dan Davis, the other daughter would’ve been a mirror of the effervescent Tillie.
It was a waste of time to speculate. Sarah Davis was a faded shadow, a mythical child who had never existed.
Hattie watched her own daughter Sarah playing with her pile of twigs. This child was no shadow.
Why did sitting in front of a fire cause her mind to skip from one random snippet of the past to the next? If Holston was home, she would ramble on and on, and he would listen. Or pretend to.
She stood, disturbed the coals with a poker, and added a large oak log. “Mama’s getting pretty good at this one-arm thing, don’t you think?” she asked Sarah.
The toddler picked up a piece of bark, studied it, and crammed it in one of her overall pockets. The little packrat. Each time Hattie did laundry, she found leaves, acorns, and rocks in pockets, and an occasional bird feather stuck inside the child’s pillowcase.
Hattie turned her backside to the hearth. Warmth soaked through her jeans. The scent of burning wood t
riggered more thoughts of Mr. D, in his worn blue-plaid flannel jacket with a hole in one elbow.
“I learned how to build a fire from your grandfather. Wish you could’ve known him.” She reached down and tousled Sarah’s hair. “He would’ve eaten you up! ‘C’mon Hattie-butt, let’s you and me get a fire going,’ he would say. Hattie-butt, that was his nickname for me, but don’t share that with just anyone.” Hattie moved onto the quilt beside her daughter and gathered her into her arms. “He would hold me close to keep me warm. He smelled like Old Spice.”
Sarah hugged Hattie then pushed away. Hattie released her grasp and let the child return to her twigs.
“Daddy would pick up an ax and bang the sides of the lean-to where we kept the woodpile. Critters lived in there. Sometimes snakes. He’d chip a few splinters off a fat lighter stump, enough to get the fire started.” Hattie plucked a twig from Sarah’s mouth. Everything had to be tasted, obviously. “I loaded the smaller logs into the wheelbarrow. Daddy would carry an armful of the larger ones. ‘Get some of this green wood,’ he would say. ‘Makes for a good, long-burning fire.’” Hattie pointed to one of the logs by the hearth. “You can tell the drier, seasoned wood by the cracks in the ends of the log. See?”
Shammie meowed. Sarah patted the Persian with one hand.
“If you use only the dry wood, you’ll go through your whole supply in a blink. When you get your fire going, you add a couple of green timbers. They’ll burn for hours.”
Hattie’s father knew everything worth knowing. And she’d teach her own daughter as much as possible. Life wasn’t all about book learning.
The phone rang. Hattie jumped up and picked up the handset. “Hello?”
Dead air answered.
“Hello? Hell-lo!”
A disconnect click followed.
“Wrong number,” she told Sarah.
She hoped.
Over the past few days, she had received a series of hang-up calls at various hours. Three times, the answering machine recorded the hiss of silence.
The phone rang again. This time, a familiar voice sounded on the other end. “What are my two favorite girls doing?”
Hattie released a relieved sigh and settled back onto a small ottoman. “Sitting in front of a roaring fire your daughter helped me build.”
“Wish I was there. So, you’ve gotten a little of this crisp weather too?”
“Supposed to be in the thirties tonight. Maybe light frost. I moved the plants inside.”
“I should’ve done that before I left. Especially with your shoulder.”
“Miz Maggie helped me. And besides, it was eighty degrees when you left, hon.”
Holston laughed. “Right.”
“When do you think you’ll be home?”
“I have one last meeting with my publisher tomorrow, and then I want to catch up with a couple of old friends. I’ve booked a flight on Wednesday, unless you need me to come sooner.”
Hattie considered. “That’s fine. I have to go over to Tallahassee tomorrow, but Jake’s going with me.”
“What’s up?”
“They think the problem might be in my neck. I disagree. I know where it hurts, but I’ll have the second MRI. That way, the orthopedist will have everything he needs next week when I go to the appointment.”
“Sure you’re okay?”
The concern in his voice touched her. Since her colon cancer surgery, Holston tuned into every nuance of her health.
“Positive. Sarah will be with Leigh, and you know Jake will hover over me like a mother hen.”
“Anything else happening?”
Should she mention the van or the strange phone calls? No. Holston would worry, and he was miles away.
“Dull as dog dirt, here on The Hill.”
They talked a couple of minutes. The house felt hollow after she hung up.
Sarah played at her feet, alternately staring at the snickering fire and taunting the cat with a pine needle. Though Shammie had been slower than Spackle to come around to the presence of a child in the house, she now adored Sarah and followed her around talking in short yowls.
Sarah babbled to the cat in a combination of gurgles and baby-talk. What did the two discuss? Baby food versus canned kitty tuna? Disposable diapers as opposed to a litter box?
The old farmhouse creaked, tiny moans and comments that served as its heartbeat. The walls wrapped around her and Sarah, a loving cloak.
Sarah rose, toddled toward the front door, and pointed to the knob. “Spua?”
Of course. How could Hattie forget the other four-legged member of the Davis-Lewis household? She opened the door and peered past the front door fixture’s circle of light. “Spackle! Here boy!”
A noise like a huffing, galloping horse sounded from the darkness. The mutt-dog loped to the door, his tail held high.
“C’mon in out of the cold. Your baby sister misses you.”
Spackle bounded inside. After a perfunctory cruise by the empty cat food bowl, he delivered a set of slobbery face-licks to Sarah. Shammie stepped aside to avoid the inevitable clubbing from the canine’s tail. The cat gave an annoyed yowl.
Hattie reached down and tousled the Persian’s ruff. “I know, Shammie. He has the manners of a cretin.”
Chapter Fifteen
When Sergeant Jerry Blount pulled the cruiser into the narrow, rutted driveway beside the Herring’s house, he spotted Mary-Esther Sloat sitting on the lower steps of the garage apartment, her face buried in her cupped hands. She glanced up and blotted her cheeks with one sleeve.
His chest constricted. God help him; he couldn’t abide a woman’s tears.
He shut off the engine, got out, and walked over to stand in front of her.
“Hi,” she said in a weak voice.
“Looks like I’ve picked a bad time to pop by.”
“Not really.” Mary-Esther patted the stair beside her. “Join me if you like. Sorry, I don’t have any chairs to offer.”
He brushed a clump of dead oak leaves aside and sat. “Heard you rented this place. Wanted to stop by and see how you were settling in.”
She offered a thin smile. “I’m as settled as a person with nothing can be.”
The woman didn’t sound like her usual upbeat self. Jerry’s honed cop instinct kicked in. Body language spoke louder than her words. “How about your new landlord and lady? You okay with them?”
“Sure. Nice folks. She’s a bit nosy.” Mary-Esther tipped her head toward the back of the Herring’s house. The curtains snapped closed.
“It’s not like I’m exciting or anything. Television has to be much more entertaining than me.”
Jerry shifted positions to alleviate the pressure from the wide service belt. “I’m glad you found a place, what with the weather taking a turn.”
How could he ferret out her obvious distress without alerting her male-intruder alarm? Might as well take the Southern gentleman’s approach. If he got his feelings stomped on, it wouldn’t be the first time. His mother often admonished him for being too much the nice guy and how it was going to cause him heartache.
“Anything wrong?” he asked.
“I think the old girl bit the bullet.” Mary-Esther motioned to the van.
Good, something concrete he might be able to solve. “What’s she doing?”
“Nothing, now. Made this tremendous banging noise like something had torn loose inside. Then she choked and died.” Mary-Esther waved her hand through the air. “And there she sits.”
“Sounds like you might have thrown a rod.”
“I’d throw a spear, if I had one.” She paused. “A rod. Sounds expensive.”
Jerry noticed tears gathering at the corners of her eyes again. “Maybe. Maybe not. You recall, I have low friends in high places.”
“Another of your third cousins fifty times removed?” Mary-Esther dabbed the moisture from her cheek with a fingertip.
“Something like that.”
“At least I can walk to work from her
e.”
“Might be able to help with that too, if you don’t mind driving a wreck.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “What? You’re offering me a car?”
Jerry chuckled. “It runs, all I’ll say. I use the county vehicle most of the time during the week. I have a vintage Mustang I fixed up for the other times. The pick-up, I bought secondhand to haul firewood, lumber, that kind of stuff. It’s parked at my house not being driven. It would do me a favor if you’d run it a little. An engine tends to go down if you let it sit idle too long.”
“That’s kind, but—”
“Look, I can have the van towed to Quincy for next to nothing. I’ll have Milton look it over, see what it’ll take to get her running.”
“The tire and brake guy?”
“Like a lot of folks around here, Milton has more than one job,” Jerry said. “Tires and brakes are his specialty, but he does other repairs on the side for close friends and family.”
Mary-Esther raked her hands through her auburn hair. “I hate this, feeling so dependent for everything! Seems like it’s all I’ve done since before Katrina.”
“Mary-Esther. . . ” Jerry willed his voice to an even tone. “Everyone needs a hand, at one time or the other. This is your time.”
Sometimes, people were a bit like spooked animals. They required a little reassurance and a gentle word. Folks called his eyes “doe-brown.” Brown as homemade gravy and just as comforting, his grandma used to say. Maybe those eyes would help calm this little Cajun woman. Same way they had comforted his dying wife, or so he hoped.
“Grandma used to say a person’s greatest challenge is to have grace,” he said. “Grace to accept help. Grace to know when to give in and let go.”
“Why is it, everyone around here tends to drag the wisdom of their ancestors into the mix?” she asked.
“Respect for our elders was beaten into us at an early age. Besides,” he winked, “most of the time, they were right.”
*
Elvina Houston chewed on the end of a pencil, intent on the Sudoku puzzle in her hands. Since they had moved her roommate, she didn’t have the endless moaning for company. God as her witness, if she didn’t get out of the rehab center soon and back into real life, she would lose what little mind she had left.
