“Of course not,” I assured her. “They always question the family first. Doesn’t mean a thing. They’ve probably got him looking at mug shots.”
Uneasily, I remembered that I’d been in the sheriff’s office an hour or so ago and neither the sheriff nor Dwight Bryant had been there.
“You sure they took him to Dobbs and not just up the road to Cotton Grove?”
She was positive.
“Well, you did say your husband was the only one to see the actual shooting, right?”
Brother and sister nodded vigorously and both seemed anxious to go over the whole incident again, explaining why neither had happened to be looking out the window at the time. Curious, I asked them every question about those hunters I could think of, yet they couldn’t seem to come up with a single new detail. They were just two big black men in a red pickup. A full-size Ford.
“Ma keeps getting it mixed up, but it was a Ford alright. About three years old.”
Cherry Lou returned to report that she’d finally gotten her granddaughter back to sleep. “Poor little thing. Keeps asking me where’s her Paw-Daddy. That’s what she calls Dallas. And he was just as foolish about her. Brought her a stuffed animal every time he come home from one of his long hauls. You can’t hardly get into her room over yonder at their trailer for all the rabbits and teddy bears. Some of them’s bigger’n she is, aren’t they, Ashley?”
She suddenly noticed my empty hands. “Didn’t you get you any tea yet? Ashley, where on earth’s your manners, girl?”
Dry as my throat was, I declined politely, expressed my condolences, promised to attend the funeral, and got out of there as quickly as I could because I’d suddenly remembered where I’d seen Fred Greene before.
When I pulled up at Jasper Stancil’s back door, that black-and-silver Jeep Cherokee was parked alongside the other vehicles.
Surprise, surprise.
I slammed my car door and stomped into the kitchen without knocking and there were the “Greenes” with Sheriff Bo Poole, Dwight Bryant, and SBI Agent Terry Wilson, all with big gotcha grins on their faces. The only person not there was Jap Stancil and I later heard that Daddy’d taken him over to his niece’s house.
In the middle of Mr. Jap’s eating table was a radio receiver and a tape recorder and I could hear Ashley’s voice wailing, “They know Tig did it, they must know or why else won’t they let him come home?”
“They don’t know shit,” her brother said. “You keep your mouth shut and Tig stays cool, we’ll all be back in Florida before Christmas.”
“No thanks to you two,” came Cherry Lou’s voice. “Won’t for me getting the gun and Tig pulling the trigger, we’d all be out on our tails without a dime.”
“Bingo!” said “Wilma.”
“Fred and Wilma Greene?” I rolled my eyes at the two black SBI agents, who tried to look innocent. “Why didn’t you use Flintstone and be done with it?”
“Sh-sh!” said Dwight as he concentrated on the bickering voices their bug was beaming over from Dallas’s house.
Terry Wilson tried to give me a hug. “Sure do ’preciate you going in there and asking all those questions for us. We didn’t get doodly with ol’ Fred and Wilma here.”
“Go to hell!” I flared. “What’s my Aunt Zell going to say when I tell her one of her best chicken casseroles is sitting down there in a murderer’s refrigerator?”
2
« ^ » … nor will it be easy to explain how they should all conspire in the same tale, and, without varying, stumble upon the same favorable accounts.“Scotus Americanus,” 1773
It was almost Halloween before the worst of the kidding died down.
Cherry Lou Stancil and her son-in-law Tig Wentworth were sitting in jail waiting to be formally arraigned on first-degree murder charges. Both were going to be under such high cash bonds that neither would be able to raise it. Cherry Lou’s main collateral was the farm, but Mr. Jap had retained John Claude Lee, my cousin and former law partner, to roadblock her putting any liens on the land till after the trial. Under North Carolina’s Slayer Statute, she’d forfeit any claims to Dallas’s estate if convicted as a principal or accessory, and since Dallas had no children from his first two marriages either, John Claude was pretty sure he could get the farm reverted to Mr. Jap as Dallas’s closest blood kin.
Turns out that the land may have triggered the shooting. A local speculator offered Dallas a hundred thousand for his place. Soon as Cherry Lou heard that, she got visions of returning to Florida in glory.
Maybe they’d even buy a house right next door to Disney World.
“In your dreams,” Dallas told her.
From that day forward, according to Mr. Jap, she was at him like a hound dog after biscuits—just wouldn’t let it alone—till one day Dallas looked around and realized he was supporting a wife, a stepson, a stepdaughter, a stepson-in-law and a step-granddaughter. And he didn’t really like a single one of them anymore except for maybe the little girl. Mr. Jap said Dallas told Cherry Lou he was going to see a lawyer about a divorce when he got home from his next run to Galveston. In the meantime, he wanted Ashley and Tig’s trailer off his land. Ashley, Tig, and Bradley, too, for that matter.
Three days later he was dead.
Cherry Lou’s two children had been charged with conspiracy, but at their probable cause hearing, the DA cut them a deal when they agreed to testify for the prosecution. They were out on relatively small bonds, secured by Bradley’s truck and Ashley’s trailer.
Tig swore he’d kill them both if he ever got turned loose and he kept badgering his court-appointed attorney to forget about murder charges for a minute and start filing divorce papers on Ashley. “And put in there that I want sole custody of my little girl. Ain’t no fit momma that’d tell on her baby’s daddy.”
Cherry Lou had disowned the whole bunch. She admitted buying the shotgun the day Dallas told Mr. Jap he was going to divorce her—how could she not with her signature on Kmart’s credit card receipt?—but it was supposed to be a Christmas present for Dallas, she said. Along with a box of shells, she said. She didn’t know why Tig decided to try it out on Dallas two months early.
“Trick or treat maybe?” Dwight suggested.
They buried Dallas at Sweetwater Missionary Baptist Church, next to his mother, who’d been the only churchgoing person in the Stancil household. She was a Yadkin though and her niece, Merrilee Yadkin Grimes, Dallas’s first cousin, made all the funeral arrangements for Mr. Jap, right down to picking out the music, “This Little Wheel’s Gonna Turn in Glory,” and the text, Ezekiel 1:21—“And when those were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up beside them; for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels.”
The preacher was good with metaphors, but even he seemed to have a right hard time stretching that particular text to fit the occasion. Merrilee was pleased with the sermon though. “Dallas loved trucking and I thought Ezekiel was real appropriate for a truck driver.”
The words of the Old Testament prophet must have touched Mr. Jap more than Merrilee could’ve hoped for. Or maybe it was losing his only child like that.
Anyhow, the next thing I heard was that Mr. Jap had got religion and painted a purple cross on his front door right above the words “Holyness Prayr Room.”
Daddy said he had about twenty pictures of Jesus tacked up on the walls and he’d made a simple cross out of two tobacco sticks and some baling wire. “Other’n that, the living room looks just like it did when Elsie was living, ’cept now Jap sits in there and reads the Bible to a couple of Mexicans that show up every Sunday morning.”
“You, too?” I asked, knowing Daddy seldom stepped inside any kind of a church except for weddings and funerals.
“Be different if he’d just read,” Daddy said regretfully. “Jap and me, we been knowing each other our whole lives, but I never much cared for being preached at.”
3
« ^ » … but, in the month of October, there cannot be a m
ore temperate air, and finer climate, than here, the weather being mild and dry for the space of forty or fifty days.“Scotus Americanus,” 1773
By the middle of October, I get pretty tired of any leftover summer dregs—the midday heat, the dust, the grasshoppers, the dogflies from hell. I’m usually ready for some serious rain and a killing frost. Especially one that’ll kill dogflies.
(Takes a sleet storm to kill grasshoppers. They just hunker down in the broom sedge and wait for sunshine. I’ve flushed grasshoppers five inches long on a sunny January day.)
So far, the nights had been cool enough to start coloring leaves and brown off most of the weeds, but one last dogfly had somehow managed to survive and it had been circling my head for several minutes, eluding my flailing hands and waiting for me to lower my guard long enough so it could land on bare skin and dig in.
Exasperated, I started to duck into a thicket of hollies to get away from it, then recoiled in automatic reflex.
Hanging upside down between two young holly trees was a spider that looked like a tiny yellow-and-white hard-shell crab, and I had almost put my face through its large delicate web. One minute the dogfly was following my head. The next minute it was entangled in the sticky strands. The more it struggled, the tighter it was held and already the spider was hurrying over, playing out more sticky threads of silk to tether those kicking legs and buzzing wings before they could break loose.
“Hey, cute trick!” said Kidd. “I never saw anybody do that before.”
If a man thinks you’ve deliberately maneuvered a pesky winged bloodsucker into a spiderweb, why tell him it was a pure accident? Can it hurt to have him think you’re uncommonly clever in the ways of the wild? Especially when he’s so crazy about the outdoors himself?
Picture six feet three inches of male lankiness. Long skinny legs. Flat belly. A face more homely than handsome. Crinkly hazel eyes that disappear when he laughs.
Kidd Chapin.
How I Spent My Summer Vacation.
You know how you’ll see pretty shells lying on the sandy beach, cast up wet and lustrous from the ocean floor, so colorful you can’t resist picking them up? You know how, months later, you find them dry and dull in a jacket pocket or stuck down in a desk drawer, and you wonder what on earth made you bring them inland?
Kidd Chapin’s a wildlife officer. I found him down at the beach back in the spring.
So far, I haven’t once wondered why I brought him home with me.
Not that I have, actually. Not in the literal hang-your-jeans-in-my-closet sense. For starters, he has his own house on the banks of the Neuse River above New Bern, and he’s assigned to cover an area down east.
“Inland” is complicated by the fact that I live in the middle of a small town with an aunt and uncle. My own quarters are relatively separate, with a private entrance which I seldom use, and no, I don’t think Aunt Zell would get out her scarlet thread and start embroidering my shirts if I chose to let Kidd use that entrance. I don’t know if it’s manners, my abiding awareness that it is their house, or an active neighborhood watch system (made up of active voters, be it stipulated) that keeps me from giving him a key.
If I were eighteen years old again, maybe I would. Maybe I’d even stand on the front porch and make a speech about hypocrisy and honesty, about personal freedom and modern morality.
But I’m a district court judge. I know the value of hypocrisy. I’ve also learned a little bit about discretion as I’ve passed thirty and race toward forty: don’t do it in the road and scare the mules. I don’t want to watch Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash struggling to be broadminded and tolerant, and I certainly don’t want judgmental neighbors putting my morals on the ballot come the next election.
If Kidd’s still around after Christmas, I may finally think about getting my own place. In the meantime, instead of taking him into my bed like a mature woman whenever he drives over, we sneak around Colleton County like a couple of horny teenagers. His new minivan has four-wheel drive, tinted windows and seats that let down flat, and it’s been up and down just about every secluded lane and byway along Possum Creek.
Kidd and I were out on the back side of my daddy’s farm that warm Sunday afternoon. We’d been to church that morning with Nadine and Herman, the brother who worries most about my soul. We’d eaten dinner with Minnie and Seth, the brother who cuts me the most slack. (Being the closest thing I had to a campaign manager, Minnie’s also the sister-in-law who’s least interested in seeing me married. She’d rather see me in the state legislature.) Now we were out running a pair of young rabbit dogs Kidd had just bought. They were barely past puppyhood and eager to please, but they didn’t have a clue and if you didn’t watch them every minute—
Well, let’s just say we both got distracted for maybe a bit more than a minute. By the time we came up for air, the dogs had got into the woods and across the creek and sounded as if they were heading for Georgia.
Kidd whooped and hollered, but they were too excited to mind and there was nothing for it but to jump back in the van and go chase them down. We both had our heads out the windows, listening for the dogs, when we rounded a corner of the field and surprised a huge flock of blackbirds. As one, they rose from the earth in a great rush of wings to settle raucously in the trees around us.
All through spring and summer, grackles and starlings are little-noticed birds. In the fall, though, they band together by the thousands in flocks so large that it can take a full two minutes for them to cross the sky. Their chatter was so noisy that the dogs could have been just beyond the trees and we wouldn’t have heard them.
When we got to the homemade bridge across the creek, Kidd wasn’t sure he wanted to risk his van on something built out of hickory logs and some scrap two-by-fours.
“It’s strong enough to hold a tank,” I assured him. “Shorty and Leonard and B.R. drive over it twice a day.”
“Who’re they?” Kidd asked as we crept across, going maybe half a mile a minute.
“Some of Daddy’s old tenants from when he was still suckering tobacco by hand. He lets them live rent-free on our side of the creek, but they work for part-time wages at Gray Talbert’s nursery and this is their shortcut.”
Kidd breathed easier when his back wheels were on firm dirt again. Not me. I’m never comfortable on Talbert land.
G. Hooks Talbert is head of Talbert International and a power player in the reactionary right wing of North Carolina’s Republican party. He has a hundred-acre country estate near Durham with a private airstrip and a couple of Lear jets. He also has two sons: one’s a grasshopper with the morals of a cowbird; the other’s a conscientious ant whose morals are probably whatever G. Hooks tells him they are.
When G. Hooks needed to stand the grasshopper in a corner, this little piece of land he’d inherited through his mother’s side was the corner he chose. Gray Talbert raised a lot of hell at first, then, to everybody’s surprise, he seemed to settle right down. Repaired the greenhouses. Started a profitable nursery.
According to Daddy, who twisted a knot in G. Hooks’s tail over that nursery, it’s totally legitimate these days, if maybe not quite as profitable as back when Gray was running it unsupervised.
Nevertheless, I was glad when Kidd stuck his head out the window again, heard the dogs, and said they’d veered off to the east. We doubled back along a lane that followed the creek bank and soon passed the iron stake that marked the corner between our land, G. Hooks’s, and Mr. Jap’s. One of those ubiquitous orange plastic ribbons was tied around the stake and the loose ends fluttered in the breeze.
Kidd slowed down to a crawl when he saw me twist around to stare out the back window. “Something wrong?”
“Just wondering who’s surveying what,” I said.
Sighting back along the Talbert line, I could see more orange ribbons tied to a distant tree at the edge of the creek bank.
“My daddy has a standing offer to buy this piece of land, but G. Hooks would dig up the whole forty-six acres a
nd ship it to China before he’d let Daddy have a square inch. If he’s getting ready to sell, you can take it to the bank that he’s found a buyer he thinks’ll give Daddy grief.”
“Why should your dad care who Talbert sells to?” asked Kidd. “He’s already got a mile-wide buffer around his house.”
An exaggeration, but not by much.
Daddy’s always happiest when he can put a little more land between himself and the outside world and he’s been adding to it ever since he was a boy of fifteen. He and my brothers own at least twenty-five hundred acres between them. A hundred or so of those acres are mine.
Some people spend money on fancy cars and lavish houses or expensive toys. We Knotts like to put our spare change in land. As Daddy always reminds us, it’s not like God’s making any more of it.
We cleared the trees and there, blocking the lane, was a shabby black two-ton farm truck with bald tires and homemade wooden sides to the flatbed. A wiry young white man in blue jeans, a faded red T-shirt, and a green John Deere cap leaned against one of the fenders as he talked with Mr. Jap. Beside the lane was a nice patch of bright orange pumpkins that looked big enough to harvest even though the vines were still green.
I hadn’t seen Mr. Jap since the funeral, so I motioned for Kidd to stop and got out to say hey.
He looked old and frail standing there with the sun beating down, as if Dallas’s death had drained off ten years of energy, and he didn’t seem to place me till I mentioned Daddy, introduced Kidd, and explained why we were there.
Then he smiled and said, “Oh, yeah. A pair of hounds went streaking past here about two minutes ago. I wouldn’t be surprised but what that rabbit’s holed up down yonder at the sheds. You just go ahead, but try not to run over no pumpkins if you can help it.”
“I’m glad you reminded me,” I told him, “because Aunt Zell asked me to bring her a dozen ears of your corn if I was out here before Halloween.”
Mr. Jap was never much of a farmer, not even in tobacco’s glory days. He so preferred working on cars that he rented out his acreage and even let some of his fallow fields go back to nature. A few years ago, though, when the influx of new people started and those newcomers couldn’t seem to get enough of the ornamental corn he brought to the crossroads flea market, Mr. Jap planted a couple of acres so he could pay for his winter heating oil. Now, to my surprise, he seemed to be in farming with both feet. Except for that small pumpkin patch, the whole back side of his farm was covered with broken stalks and culled ears.
Up Jumps the Devil dk-4 Page 3
