Down Home Dixie

by Pamela Browning

  He finished his breakfast as he thoughtfully gazed out over the lake where cattails swayed gently in the breeze and a lone sailboat was tacking toward the far shore. In Ohio, spring had yet to be sprung, flowers had yet to bloom, and in some places, snow had yet to melt. Back home he had an apartment, a dracaena that needed watering and a landlady who insisted on mothering him. At the moment, the most important thing seemed to be the dracaena, which ought to tell him something about himself, his life and what he planned to do with it.

  Back home was a situation that he was loath to face, but he wasn’t ready to admit that yet even to himself. And so he daydreamed of buying a sailboat of his own and sailing it across Pine Hollow Lake without a care in the world and with a charming woman by his side.

  She looked a lot like Dixie Lee Smith, but she could have been anybody. Anybody he didn’t know.

  WHEN DIXIE ARRIVED home from church, Kyle was weeding the flower beds.

  She didn’t notice him as she parked her Mustang in the detached garage, but as she walked toward the house, she stopped short at the sight of him wearing old khaki shorts that he’d found in a box labeled Church Charity Closet. The box had held other garments, none of which appeared as if they’d fit Dixie—a pair of boys’ overalls, baby things, children’s winter coats.

  She stood there, hands on her hips and head cocked to one side. “Why, Kyle Sherman!” she exclaimed. “What on earth are you doing?”

  “Work that needs to be done.” He straightened and smiled at her, wiping the perspiration from his forehead.

  “I certainly didn’t expect you to hire on as my yard man,” she said, but it was clear that she was pleased. She walked around the flower bed, studying it. “I plan to plant marigolds here, all colors,” she said.

  “That would be pretty,” he said. “I figured that in this climate, you might be ready for planting.”

  “It’ll be soon, but I’m not much of a gardener. My sister, Carrie, used to have the most beautiful plantings all around the home place. That’s where she lived before she got married. She and her husband claim they’re going to take up residence there, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they do.”

  “That’s the sister who lives in Rome?”

  “She’s only visiting there while her husband is on location. She’s married to Luke Mason, the movie star. She met him when he was filming a movie here.”

  “I never knew anyone who married a movie star.”

  “It took everyone in our family by surprise.”

  Kyle knelt again, determined to finish this job before she made him leave. “I figure we can go get my truck after I’m through here. If you have time, I mean.”

  “I drove past the dentist’s office on my way home from church. That sure is a different-looking truck you have, all that chrome and the boxy shape of it.”

  It wasn’t the first time someone had been curious about the truck, a modified pickup. “I’m a farrier,” he said.

  “A what?”

  “A horseshoer. I shoe horses. I carry equipment with me. Forge, anvil, grinders, horseshoes, things like that.”

  She appeared intrigued. “You’re the first farrier I’ve ever met. Where do you work?”

  “I have my own business and service stable horses, pets, a few mules here and there. I love what I do, and it fits in well with my hobby. I take care of the cavalry horses at the reenactments.”

  Dixie sat on a nearby tree stump. “Some of the things you said last night about reenactments—they touched me,” she said. “Though I could do without your being related to General Sherman.”

  He glanced at her briefly, but kept weeding, tossing uprooted plants into an old bushel basket. “If it’s any comfort, my great-grandfather was never formally acknowledged by the Sherman family. He was the illegitimate child of the general’s unmarried son and took the Sherman name only after his father died.”

  “Oh. Is that a sore point?”

  “Not to me, but you won’t find our branch of the family on any genealogical charts.”

  She thought that over for a moment. “Um, where can I go to a reenactment?”

  “In Camden there’s an excellent one every fall. It’s a Revolutionary War reenactment, so I don’t participate, but you might enjoy it.”

  “The battle of Camden…didn’t the Americans lose that one?”

  He grinned. “I’m afraid so. You’re up on your history lessons.”

  “I won a medal in eighth grade for the highest average in middle-school history courses. I was proud of it.”

  He stood up, surveyed the flower bed. He’d eliminated the weeds, but it still needed edging. “That’s a whole lot better. I’d be glad to clear the weeds out of the other beds for you.”

  “Aren’t we going to drive downtown to get your truck?”

  “Well, sure.” He leaned back, hands on his hips. “It’s just that I don’t really need to be anyplace special right away. I have another guy covering my business for me back in Ohio. In fact, I’d like to ride around the horse country near Camden, and if you’re agreeable, maybe we could barter a few more days’ lodging in your cottage for my work around the place.”

  “Yankee, you’ve got a deal.”

  He reached out his hand to shake hers then quickly withdrew it when he realized his was too dirty to touch anything but more weeds. “I guess I’d better take another shower,” he said ruefully.

  “Okay, I’m going to change clothes. I’ll be going on to my grandmother’s house for Sunday dinner.” She hesitated, clearly unsure of her ground. “You could come with me if you like. It’s nothing fancy, just a simple family meal, but you’ll leave well fed.”

  “I’d like that,” he said slowly. “I’d like it a lot.”

  Dixie aimed a smile at him, one that could knock a man over at twenty paces. Her skirt swung with a flirtatious flip as she started toward the house. “Be ready in half an hour, and I’ll tell Memaw that there’ll be one extra. We’ll go get your truck first and drop it off here on our way to her house.” She stopped and frowned, half turning around. “Another thing,” she added. “While we’re there, don’t tell anyone your last name.” She disappeared into the house, the door shutting firmly behind her.

  What the heck does she mean, don’t tell anyone your last name? Kyle wondered as he hefted the basket of weeds. Still puzzling over it, he went to check his cell phone. It still hadn’t revived, but that was okay. Suddenly he didn’t feel a need to be connected, and that was a freeing feeling. Whistling, he went inside to take a shower.

  WHEN THEY WENT into town to retrieve Kyle’s truck, Dixie put the top down on her convertible. Her hair ruffled in the wind, and they passed countless fields readied for spring planting. Dixie drove a little too fast for Kyle’s taste, but she was a competent driver and he didn’t object.

  At the dentist’s parking lot, she was curious to inspect his truck. “The cargo area’s built on the chassis of a regular pickup,” Kyle explained. “The sides and back open upward so I can get to my equipment.”

  He flipped up the rear hatch. “This makes shade where I stand to work if there isn’t a tree or barn around.” He also opened the sides, which lifted up like wings, so she could see the variety of horseshoes stacked on “trees” expressly made for that purpose. Racks and compartments held rasps and nails. He kept his equipment scrupulously neat and clean, and Dixie seemed impressed.

  “Maybe I’ll get to watch you shoe a horse someday,” she said.

  “Maybe you will,” he told her, liking the idea.

  They dropped his truck off next to the sasanqua hedge beside her driveway, and Kyle slid back into the passenger side of the car. He wasn’t quite sure what to expect at this gathering of the Smith clan, so Dixie explained about her family as they drove into the countryside.

  “Our branch of Smiths have resided in the area since before the American Revolution,” she told him. “Several of my ancestors fought in the War Between the States. Their names are engraved on the base of the
statue of the Confederate soldier in Memorial Park downtown.”

  This was apparently the root of Dixie’s reluctance to mention his last name to her family. Kyle didn’t understand; generations had lived and died since the end of the Civil War. People should be over it. Still, twenty-nine years ago, because that’s how old she said she was, someone had named this woman Dixie Lee to commemorate an ill-fated nation and its greatest general, Robert E. Lee.

  Dixie kept talking. “Memaw Frances is my paternal grandmother. My daddy died some years ago of heart disease, and Mama was just plain prostrate with grief. Then, in a worst-case scenario, she suffered a fatal embolism shortly after we lost Daddy. I’ve no lack of relatives, so I have a large extended family. What my sister and I would have done without them, I can’t imagine.”

  Kyle, whose father had retired to the Florida Keys where he earned a marginal living as a fishing guide and whose mother had run off with a magazine salesman not long after he was born, knew little about big families and said so.

  “Why, I can’t imagine not getting everyone together on Sundays like we do,” she said with honest astonishment. “What on earth do you do instead?”

  Kyle couldn’t really answer that. Sunday was just like any other day to him, only there were a lot more sports programs on TV. Sometimes Andrea stayed over, and they’d go out for breakfast, or he’d get together with his reenactor friends. He’d never considered that he was missing anything.

  Along the way, Dixie pointed out the Smith family’s old home place, a large Victorian house that belonged to her sister, Carrie, and her husband. About a quarter of a mile down the road, Frances Smith lived in a sprawling brick rancher at the end of a long driveway winding through a pecan grove.

  He followed Dixie into the house. A picture of Ronald Reagan hung beside the door and a well-worn Bible lay on the hall table. Dixie’s grandmother looked to be a spry eighty. The guests included Dixie’s cousin Voncille, an ample-size redhead with a hearty laugh and a husband who barely spoke a word. The husband’s name was Skeeter, and he and Voncille had four children, stair steps named Paul, Liddy, Amelia and Petey.

  Claudia, Frances’s sister, who was hard of hearing, had brought her unmarried son, Jackson, who immediately pulled Kyle aside and asked him if he liked to watch pornographic movies. Another male relative named Estill, hollow of chest and bald of head, lurked on the outskirts of the group, and Kyle had no idea what his relation was to anybody else, nor did anyone explain it.

  The children were all extremely handsome and reasonably well behaved, excluding the younger girl, Amelia, who kept wailing that she wanted a Tootsie Roll, and right now, please. No one paid any attention to her. Kyle considered suggesting that he run to the nearest convenience store and buy her the Tootsie Roll just to shut her up, then decided that if her parents didn’t care about her whining, he should try to get used to it.

  After he brushed off the question from Jackson about the porn movies, Kyle tried to stick close to Dixie, which meant that he was recruited to snap the ends off green beans while she fried the chicken. Memaw Frances busied herself mashing potatoes by hand, and once she’d eliminated all the lumps to her satisfaction, she dug around in the pantry for pickled okra that she never found.

  “Memaw didn’t make pickled okra last year,” Voncille whispered to Dixie and Kyle on her way to the refrigerator to pour juice for Petey. “She keeps forgetting is all.”

  Frances’s big lace-covered walnut table provided plenty of room for everyone, and it was set with fine china and crystal. Dixie seemed to take everything in stride, including being seated next to the profoundly deaf Claudia, who had to be told everything twice, even if it was only to please pass the salt. Kyle was seated on Frances’s right, which meant that he had to endure a spate of tough questions while steering her away from queries about his name. Not only that, Dixie had also suggested quite strongly that he not mention the reenactment at Rivervale Bridge or the fact that he’d worn a blue Yankee uniform.

  Kyle didn’t like to meet Dixie’s family or anyone else and not be able to tell them who he was, but he honored her request. That wasn’t difficult to do when he recalled that while riding in the car with her to get his truck a while ago, her hand had so softly brushed his arm as she reached to slide the key into the ignition. His skin had crinkled into goose bumps at her touch and he wondered what would happen if their skin made contact again.

  “YOU’RE FROM WHERE, CAL?” Claudia shouted across the table, knotting her face into a frown that rolled lines of pink powder from wrinkle to wrinkle.

  “OHIO,” he shouted back, unsure whether to correct Claudia’s pronunciation of his name.

  “And then I told her, ‘Hon, I’m not going to any shower for the daughter of a woman who cut me dead when Skeeter and I had to get married,’” Voncille was telling Dixie.

  “Can I have more chicken?” asked Paul, and Voncille forked a drumstick onto his plate without losing a beat in her monologue.

  “You ever heard of Linda Lovelace?” Jackson asked Estill, who remained bowed over his plate and kept spooning mashed potatoes into his mouth, which appeared deficient in teeth.

  “And your mother’s maiden name was what?” Frances asked Kyle with interest.

  “Oh, you wouldn’t know his people, Memaw,” Dixie volunteered hastily. “By the way, this is the best cranberry relish you’ve ever made.”

  “Let me tell you how I make it so you can do it yourself. I take my food grinder—that’s the old crank one that Mama had when she first married—and I wash the cranberries real good, getting all the dirt and leaves off. Then I—”

  “I intended to send a present, but right off I changed my mind, money being tight and Skeeter being jobless again,” Voncille said. “Maybe I’ll just mail a card after the baby’s born, whether Jenny gets married or not.”

  “Listen, dumbhead, stop kicking me under the table,” Liddy told her brother, who reached for the creamed corn and managed to spill it down the front of his shirt, whereupon Skeeter, his father, sent him to the bathroom to clean it off.

  “You grind up the nuts medium-coarse, and pecans are best,” Frances went on. “Lord knows I’ve got enough pecans from my trees, that is, if the squirrels don’t get them all.”

  “Did you say you were from Iowa?” Voncille asked Kyle politely.

  “Get all the little pieces of shell off the nuts before you grind them. You could break a tooth otherwise.”

  Kyle kept munching on his third piece of fried chicken. He’d heard that Southerners really had a way with fried chicken, but he wouldn’t have believed it could be so light and crispy.

  “They’ve got this back room at the video store, it’s for adults only,” Jackson was telling Skeeter enthusiastically.

  Voncille shot a warning glance in his direction and addressed him in an undertone that everyone heard anyway. “Jackson, there are children present. Please talk about something else.”

  “I didn’t get any mashed potatoes, Mom. Can you put gravy on? Who’s Linda Lovelace?” Paul asked.

  “Kyle shoes horses. It’s what he does for a living,” Dixie explained to someone, Kyle wasn’t sure who.

  “HE SHOOTS HORSES? WHAT KIND OF JOB IS THAT?” Claudia asked, and Kyle almost choked on a mouthful of iced tea.

  “Kyle shoes horses, Aunt Claudia,” Liddy said in her loudest voice.

  Frances blinked off into the distance for a moment. “I had a horse when I was a child. His name was Booster. Now, how come I can remember that horse’s name when I can’t even recall where I put the pickled okra?”

  “I carry everything I need for shoeing a horse around in my truck,” Kyle told Liddy who stared at him entranced.

  “The horse, too?”

  “No, not the horse, the horseshoes and the equipment I use to attach the shoes to their hooves.”

  “Daddy, when can I have a Tootsie Roll?” Amelia chimed in.

  “Hush up, Amelia.”

  “You use big long nails, right?
”

  “Does it hurt the horse?” Paul asked.

  “And then I fold in the cranberries, just so.”

  “Uncle Estill, would you like to go to the video store with me sometime? Next week, maybe?” Jackson asked despite a glare from Voncille. Still gumming mashed potatoes, Estill gave no sign that he’d heard.

  “I KNEW SOME KALBS OVER NEAR LAURENS,” Claudia shouted. “A BIG FAMILY. THEY OWNED A CAR DEALERSHIP.”

  “No relation,” Kyle said.

  “And then all you have to do is put it in the refrigerator and eat it,” Frances said, though Kyle was sure that by this time, no one was listening.

  It went on like this until all the fried chicken and mashed potatoes were gone, which was when Voncille pushed back her chair. “Well, I guess we’re all finished eating. Is anyone ready for fudge cake? I brought one along.”

  Estill raised his head and spoke for the first time. “I’d like some cake, Vonnie, but first I’ll have some of that pickled okra. Can you mash it up real good?”

  “I told you, Estill, I couldn’t find the pickled okra,” Frances said with great patience.

  “Come on out to the kitchen, Memaw, I’ll help you search for it,” Liddy said comfortably as she slid off her chair. She took Frances’s hand and the two of them disappeared.

  Kyle caught Dixie’s eye and was surprised to recognize an amused glint there. He smiled back, and she shrugged lightly as if to say she couldn’t help it, this was her family and she loved them.

  Though he was lacking in family himself, her attitude struck Kyle as really important. Some people would be embarrassed by the carryings on and eccentricities of the people involved. However, Dixie had made it plain that she was not. Maybe more than anything else, Kyle liked this about her.

  WHEN THE TWO OF THEM arrived back at Dixie’s place after dinner, Kyle wished she wouldn’t go inside right away. He had no desire to spend the rest of the evening alone contemplating the sexual sparks that seemed to fly between them.

  “I had a good time,” he said. “Thanks for inviting me.”