Hard Row dk-13
Page 29
“On a personal level? Or about him speaking for
Palmeiro and giving him work while he repaired the
damage he’d done?”
“Your personal life’s your own as long as it doesn’t
compromise your handling of the job.” He kept his
tone neutral.
Her eyes flashed indignantly. “You think I let our re-
lationship get in the way of the investigation?”
“That’s what I’m asking. Did you?”
She shook her head. “No, sir. I really don’t think I
did. I didn’t know Mike had gone to court for Palmeiro
till Friday. McLamb mentioned that he’d seen him at
the courthouse and when I asked Mike, he was ab-
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solutely up front about it. He said he felt sorry for
the guy because his baby had died and his wife had
left him. He didn’t describe the baby’s condition, just
that it was stillborn. We didn’t know the body parts
were Harris’s yet and I certainly didn’t know till this
morning when your—when Judge Knott told us that
Palmeiro had worked for Harris. That was the first
time I’d heard it.”
“It wasn’t the first time Diaz had heard it, though,”
Dwight said.
Richards let the implications of his words sink in. “Did
he know Palmeiro killed Harris?” she asked hesitantly.
“He says not.”
“Do you believe him?”
Dwight shrugged. “Know is one of those slippery
words. Did Palmeiro confess to him? Did he see the guy
swing the axe? Probably not.”
“But you think he knew,” Richards said.
“Don’t you?”
They rode in silence another mile or two, then
Richards said, “My family. My dad and my brothers and
my sister? They say that they’ll never speak to me again
if I marry him.”
“What about your mother?”
“She’ll go along with them, but she’d probably sneak
and call me once in a while.”
“Family’s important,” he observed as they reached
the Dobbs city limits.
She sighed. “Yes.”
Dwight pulled into the parking lot beside the court-
house and cut the engine. As she reached for the door
handle, he said, “Look, Richards. Your personal life is
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MARGARET MARON
none of my business as long as you can keep it separate
from the job. But I’m going to say this even though I
probably shouldn’t. If you’re going to break up with
him because you don’t love him, that’s one thing. But
don’t use the job or what he knew or didn’t know as an
excuse if it’s really because of your family. You owe it to
yourself to tell him the truth.”
298
C H A P T E R
35
The retention of the old family homestead and farm by a
long line of ancestry for successive generations is, in many
respects a desideratum, whether we regard it in the prac-
tical light of an investment or of a pardonable pride, as
the basis of the sentiment of family honor and respectability
that is to be associated with the name and the inheritance.
—Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890
Deborah Knott
Thursday Evening, March 9
% By the time I adjourned for the day, the news had
gone all around the courthouse that Buck Harris
had been murdered by one of his field hands because his
wanton carelessness with pesticides had caused the still-
birth of that field hand’s baby.
The news media had swarmed around the courthouse
and out to the Buckley place as well, not that they got
much joy there. None of the workers wanted to talk, and
Mrs. Harris refused to meet with them; but her daugh-
ter, while sidestepping any statements that would admit
culpability, was ready to use the situation as a soapbox to
propose a more socially responsible program for “guest
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MARGARET MARON
workers.” Reporters came away with an earful of statistics
about the appalling conditions most growers imposed on
their laborers, all for the saving of a few pennies a pound
on the fruits and vegetables they harvested. While it was
interesting that the “tomato heiress,” as they were calling
her, planned to move down from New York and turn the
family homeplace into a center for bettering the lives of
migrants, Susan Hochmann was not photogenic enough
to hold their attention for long.
Here in the courthouse, sympathies seemed to take
a slight shift from the dead man to his killer as more
and more details came out about the baby and about
Harris’s deliberate violations of OSHA and EPA regula-
tions, not to mention simple human decency.
“You hate to blame the victim,” said a records clerk
who had just come back from maternity leave with a
CD full of baby pictures as her new screen saver, “but
damned if he wasn’t asking for it.”
“I’m not saying it’s ever right to kill,” one of the at-
torneys told me, “but I’d take his case in a heartbeat. Bet
I could get him off with a suspended sentence, too.”
All cameras focused on the sensational gory murder.
It would be the lead story of the day. Not much atten-
tion would be paid to the shooting death of a young
woman by her abusive ex-husband who then turned the
gun on himself. Nothing particularly newsworthy about
that. Happens all the time, doesn’t it?
As soon as I heard, I adjourned court an hour early
and went around to Portland’s house.
“She’s upstairs,”Avery said when he let me in. “Dwight
was here before. It was good of him to come tell her
himself.”
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HARD ROW
I found her standing by a window in the nursery. Her
eyes were red and swollen when she turned to me. “She
couldn’t make it to high ground, Deborah.”
“I know, honey,” I said and opened my arms to her as
she burst into tears.
The baby awoke as we were talking and she sat down
with little Carolyn and opened her shirt to nurse her.
“If it weren’t for you,” she told her daughter, “I’d be
killing a bottle of bourbon about now.”
Her eyes filled up with tears again. “I guess I’ll call
Linda Allred tonight. Tell her to add another statistic to
her list.”
When I got home that evening, Daddy was sitting on
the porch to watch Dwight and Cal finish cleaning out
the interior of the truck before carefully smoothing a
Hurricanes sticker to the back bumper. Cal wanted to
clamp our flag on the window, but Dwight vetoed that
idea.
“Save it for Deborah’s car,” he said. “My truck’s not
a moving billboard.”
Bandit was frisking around the yard in an unsuccess-
ful attempt to get Blue and Ladybell to romp with him,
but those two hounds were too old and dignified for
&nbs
p; such frivolity.
Dwight followed me into our bedroom while I
changed out of heels and panty hose into jeans and
sneakers. “You hear about Karen Braswell?”
I nodded. “Thanks for going over there yourself.”
“She gonna be okay?”
“The baby helps.”
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MARGARET MARON
“God, Deb’rah. What’s it gonna take? This is the
second one in three months. We took his damn guns.
Where’d he get that one?”
“Don’t beat up on yourself, Dwight. You said it your-
self. There’s no stopping somebody who’s determined
to kill and doesn’t care about the consequences. If it
hadn’t been a gun, it would have been a knife or even
his bare hands.”
We went back outdoors and the blessed mundane
flowed back over us. Cal was antsy to leave because they
planned to pick up a new pair of sneakers for him on the
way in. The lower the sun sank, the cooler the air be-
came and my sweater was suddenly not thick enough.
“Come on in,” I told Daddy, “and I’ll fix us some-
thing to eat.”
“Naw, Maidie’s making supper. Why don’t you come
eat with us? You know there’s always extra.”
“Okay,” I said, but he didn’t get up.
“Are we expecting somebody?” I asked.
“Some of the children said they was gonna stop by,
show us what they plan to grow on that land we give
’em last week.”
Even as he spoke, a couple of pickups drove up and
several of my nieces and nephews tumbled out—Zach’s
Lee and Emma, Seth’s Jessie, Haywood’s Jane Ann, and
Robert’s Bobby, who carried a large sunflower that he
handed to me with a flourish.
“Sunflowers?” I laughed. “You’re going to grow sun-
flowers?”
“Hey, they’re real trendy now,” he told me.
“The short ones make great cut flowers,” said Jane
Ann, “but those that we don’t sell fresh, we can wire the
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HARD ROW
dried heads and sell as organic sunflower seeds to hang
from a bird feeder. Cardinals go crazy over them.”
“But this is going to be our real moneymaker.” Jessie
set a bud vase with a single stem of pure white flowers
on the table and an incredibly sweet fragrance met me
even before I leaned forward to smell. “Polianthes tu-
berosa. Almost no pests, doesn’t need a lot of fertilizer,
and we can market them for fifty cents to a dollar a stem
depending on whether we sell them retail or wholesale.
This one cost me two-fifty at the florist shop in Cotton
Grove and he said he’d much rather buy locally than
getting them shipped in from Mexico.”
“Yeah,” said Lee. “Judy Johnson, Mother’s cousin up
near Richmond, has an acre that she and her husband
tend pretty much by themselves. She says we’ll probably
be able to cut ours from the end of July till frost. Up
there, they cut anywhere from a hundred and fifty to six
hundred stems a day.”
“That’s a gross of close to nine thousand dollars an
acre,” said Emma, who seemed to be channeling the
soul of an accountant these days.
“What about fertilizer?” Daddy asked. “I hear that
organic stuff ’s right expensive.”
“Chicken manure,” said Bobby. “You know that poul-
try place over on Old Forty-eight? He raises the biddies
from hatching to six weeks and he’s got a mountain of
it out back. Says we can have it for the hauling. We’ll
compost the new stuff and go ahead and spread the old
soon as we can afford a spreader.”
Daddy laughed. “Y’all ever take a good look at some
of them things a-setting under the shelters back of those
old stick barns?”
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MARGARET MARON
Lee’s face lit up. “You’ve got a manure spreader?”
“Parked it there twenty-five years ago when we got
rid of the last of the mules and cows. It probably needs
new tires and some WD-40, but y’all can have it if you
want.”
Jane Ann jumped up and gave him a big hug that
almost knocked his hat off. “You just saved us four hun-
dred dollars and trucking one down from Burlington,
Granddaddy!”
They all rushed off to check it out before dark, as ex-
cited as if Daddy had told them he had an old spaceship
they could use to fly to the moon.
He straightened his hat and stood to go. “What you
reckon Robert’s gonna say when they drag that old
thing out?”
I laughed. “Myself, I can’t wait to hear what Haywood
and Isabel have to say about growing flowers for a
crop.”
“Beats ostriches,” he said slyly.
“What about you?” I asked as we walked out to his
truck. The hounds jumped up in back and I put Bandit
in the cab between us. “What do you think about grow-
ing flowers?”
He smiled. “Tell you what, shug. Flowers or mush-
rooms or even ostriches—it don’t matter one little bit.
Anything that keeps ’em here on the farm another gen-
eration’s just fine with me.”
304
Document Outline
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
January
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
FB2 document info
Document ID: a2909152-cbfc-4959-9467-248506446a30
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 25.11.2012
Created using: calibre 0.8.48 software
Document authors :
Margaret Maron
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