Up Jumps the Devil dk-4

by Margaret Maron

  Once there had been only a single magnolia tree in the center. After years of neglect, volunteer pines and cedars and wild cherries had sprung up out of the very graves themselves. Honeysuckle and poison oak had overgrown the stones so badly that the men in the family had to go with bush knives and chainsaws to clear a way for the gravediggers when it was time to lay the grandfather to rest last spring.

  “She was scared to do anything while Grampy was alive,” said Geraldine, “but the minute he was buried, look what she did.”

  Geraldine’s suit asked for no money damages, merely that her cousin be forced to remove the new driveway that now encroached upon the cemetery.

  “First she wanted me to sell her a strip of my yard and when I wouldn’t, she asked Grampy to let her take part of the graveyard. But he said no because his Aunt Sally and Uncle George were buried right there at the edge. They didn’t have a bought stone, just some rocks for a marker. Marker rocks that she moved.”

  I repressed a sigh. It seems that growth doesn’t affect lifestyles alone. It governs death styles, too.

  Home burials have become increasingly rare and many of the little private graveyards have been abandoned as the descendants die off or move away or are simply too distantly descended to care any longer. If they even remember.

  That overgrown square sitting out in the middle of a field can get real tiresome to a farmer who’s had to keep plowing around it. “Nobody ever visits it,” he rationalizes to himself and the day comes when he simply plows right through it. The stones make good doorsteps or garden benches.

  Bulldozers dispose of gravestones even more efficiently.

  Every time new crowds up against old, old is what gives way.

  A few years earlier, the cousins’ grandfather had drawn a diagram of the different plots, each rectangle neatly labeled in his old-fashioned wavery handwriting.

  I was shown this drawing along with a copy that had all the property lines drawn in to scale. In that one, the rectangles labeled “George Patterson—d. 1894” and “Sally Patterson—d. 1913” appeared to be approximately ten feet from Geraldine Stevens’s property line.

  “Here’s how it is right now, Your Honor,” said her attorney, one Brandon Frazier, who was so young that you could almost hear his shiny new law degree crackling in his back pocket. “These two little piles of rocks right there have been moved so that they’re now almost twenty feet from my client’s property line.”

  Fifteen of those feet had been paved over in August.

  “She’s driving back and forth right over her own great-great-aunt and -uncle!” Geraldine said tearfully. “And it’s wrong!”

  “Tell me, Mrs. Stevens,” said Edward (“My friends call me Big Ed”) Whitbread as he rose ponderously to his feet. Ed Whitbread is not my favorite attorney. He’s pompous and dull-witted and he opposed me in the primary when I first ran for judge. “How old was your grandfather when he drew this diagram?”

  “I don’t know. Seventy-five or eighty maybe.”

  “And was he a professional draftsman?”

  “No, he was a farmer.”

  “A farmer,” Whitbread said portentously. “I see. Yet you claim he made an accurate drawing, to scale, with no formal training, when well past seventy?”

  “My Grampy was sharp as a tack right up to the month before he died, and he certainly knew where his Aunt Sally was buried. He was eleven years old and he remembered going to her funeral.”

  “I’m sure he thought he remembered,” Whitbread said genially.

  As the questioning continued, Allen entered the back of the room and slid into a rear bench. He was alone and didn’t appear to be fleeing, so I had to assume that his alibi stood up to a cursory check and that Dwight had turned him loose.

  But why was he here?

  And why was I worrying about Allen when young Mr. Frazier was summing up for the plaintiff?

  With little else to fall back on, he cited the drawing as ample proof that his client’s cousin had willfully changed the dimensions of the cemetery, thereby showing great disrespect for the dead who had a right to lie undisturbed.

  “No respect for her ancestors?” Ed Whitbread snorted at the very idea. “Your Honor, you’ve seen the photographs of how disgracefully overgrown that cemetery looked before my client took it in hand. And you’ve seen the photographs of how it looks today.”

  I might disdain Whitbread, but he had a point. In the earlier snapshots it was hard to even see the headstones. Now the trash trees were gone, a single magnolia’s lower limbs had been pruned so that a concrete bench sat in its shade, and the well-mowed grass made the plot look almost like a small park. Azalea bushes neatly bordered the wide new driveway. Very pretty.

  “Mrs. Stevens,” I said. “In the years preceding your grandfather’s death, did you ever help your cousin clean off that graveyard?”

  “She never cleaned it off,” said Geraldine. “I would’ve helped if everybody else did. But after Grampy quit doing it, nobody else ever offered.”

  (What Allen thought of her answer could be read on his face. He was following the testimony like a play and her words made him roll his eyes at me. One thing—maybe the only thing—that could be said in Allen Stancil’s favor: I never saw him shy away from hard or dirty work.)

  My options were clear. If I believed Geraldine and dear old Grampy’s diagram, which I was inclined to do, then opportunistic Annice had indeed moved the rocks and, in defiance of the laws of North Carolina, was now driving over the remains of her great-great-aunt and uncle. Not that much could be remaining after nearly a century.

  No matter how I ruled, the animosity and hard feelings between these two cousins would no doubt continue. If I found for Geraldine and ordered Annice to remove the paving and restore her drive to its previous narrow width, the cemetery would probably fall back into a neglected state. Clearly Geraldine cared nothing about old Grampy’s final resting place. It wasn’t in her front yard. The important thing was to give her cousin grief by making Annice tear up that new driveway.

  If I found Geraldine’s suit without merit—and except for a freehand diagram drawn by an old man, she had shown me no overwhelming proof to support her accusation—the graveyard would probably be kept in immaculate condition from here on out. Not, however, because Annice gave a true goddamn about the place. She reminded me of Adam, only instead of a business in California, her goal was a driveway wide enough to accommodate a Cadillac. One thing about it, though: from now on, Annice would be forced to prove to a watching world (i.e., her neighbors and the rest of the family) that she had more respect for her ancestors than anyone could ever ask.

  “The law is the law,” the preacher said sternly. “You can’t overlook the desecration of two graves just because a half-abandoned site is now prettied up.”

  I thought of our own family graveyard, bordered in old-fashioned roses and kept in loving repair. My mother is there. So is Daddy’s first wife. They lie amid my grandparents and great-grandparents and children that died of diphtheria and croup a hundred years ago. Daddy and some of the older boys want to be buried there, but will any of the grandchildren?

  “The law is the law,” the preacher repeated inexorably.

  “The letter of the law is not always the spirit of the law,” the pragmatist pointed out.

  I remembered Roots and the Bicentennial and how they inspired amateur genealogists to go out and inventory all the little graveyards in the state, and I knew that this law had been expressly written to keep them from quietly disappearing beneath a farmer’s plow or a developer’s bulldozer.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Frazier,” I said, “but your client has failed to provide meaningful proof of her claim that this graveyard has been desecrated. I find her suit without merit. Case dismissed.”

  Allen Stancil caught up with me as I was pushing open the rear door to head for my chamber.

  “Just what I’d of done, darlin’. If you’re finished now, could you give me a lift home?”

>   21

  « ^ » I would therefore offer them a caution, and recommend temperance and abstemiousness to them for the first season, till by degrees, they are inured to the place…“Scotus Americanus,” 1773

  One of Dwight’s deputies had picked Allen up and one of them could have taken him home, but there was such a hangdog look on his face that I felt sorry for him. Besides, I was still curious about where he’d been all weekend and why he’d been evasive with Dwight about it.

  But we had driven out from Dobbs with less than a half-dozen sentences between us. Every conversational remark went nowhere, so I quit trying and concentrated on the road west from Dobbs.

  Night was coming on clear and cold. The sun slid below the chilled horizon and bare-twigged trees were silhouetted against the vivid red-orange sky like gothic stone tracery against a stained-glass window. Venus hung like a solitary jewel at the precise point where the vermilion of sunset met the deep blue of night.

  Allen seemed so sunk in thought that we were almost to the Old Forty-Eight cutoff before he finally roused himself enough to say, “I could sure go for a piece of catfish. How ’bout we swing past Jerry’s for some takeout? I’m buying.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Aw, come on, Deb’rah,” he wheedled. “For old time’s sake? I pure hate to eat by myself and the thought of going back to Uncle Jap’s house with him not there no more—”

  For once, there was no double meaning, no suggestive randiness in his voice. It was just starting to sink in that the old man was really dead, and it seemed to be hitting him hard.

  Reluctantly, I turned off Forty-Eight onto the two-lane hardtop that leads to Jerry’s.

  Jerry’s Steak & Catfish is a head-shaking phenomenon to the old-timers around here, our first homegrown example of “If you build it, they will come.”

  When Jerry Upchurch’s father died a few years back, Jerry was determined to keep the land in the family, so even though he had a secure job managing a restaurant in Raleigh, he bought out his two sisters and set about looking for a way to make the place pay. He knew he didn’t want to farm tobacco—he’d had his fill of that growing up—but he had a son who thought catfish might flourish in the irrigation pond, both his sisters and his wife knew a thing or two about cooking, and there were teenagers in the family who could wait and bus tables. There were also several displaced farmworkers in the neighborhood who were willing to skin and fillet catfish or wash dishes for good steady wages.

  Before anybody could turn around three times, a rough-hewn restaurant rose up in the pasture overlooking the pond.

  Cracker-barrel sages laughed at the Upchurches behind their backs. A catfish place out in the middle of nowhere? Half a mile off the main road? When we already had a barbecue house that served lunch and supper, not to mention service stations at every main crossroads with their soft-drink boxes and snack-food racks? How was Jerry going to find enough customers in a county where housewives still make biscuits from scratch every night?

  Cracker-barrel sages hadn’t noticed that full-time, biscuit-making housewives were getting sort of scarce on the ground, or that most of those new houses held outlanders with different eating habits. They hadn’t paid attention to how many of their own sons and daughters, never mind all the new people, were driving home every evening from jobs in Raleigh instead of walking in from the fields. Nor did they realize how happy it made working wives not to have to cook and wash up a pile of dishes every single night.

  The Upchurches have since trebled their dining room and dug two more catfish ponds.

  “They got ’em a license to print money,” those cracker-barrel sages tell each other now, as if they knew it all along.

  Jerry admits that the money’s nice, but he’s just happy he got to stay on Upchurch land and build something for the next generation.

  While Allen went inside, I waited in the car overlooking the fishponds and watched aerators jet water ten feet up into the night sky. Each jet spray is illuminated by a different-colored spotlight as if they were ornamental fountains instead of a simple way to oxygenate the crowded waters. We were early enough that only a few people had arrived ahead of us, and Allen soon returned with a big brown paper sack that filled my car with the smell of hot fish and cornbread.

  Jap Stancil’s house was less than five minutes away, and a cold cheerless place it was to walk into. Allen set our food on the kitchen table and lit all four bricks of the wall-hung gas heater while I rummaged in cupboards and drawers for glasses and silverware.

  The kitchen was clean and tidy, not a spoon or mug out of place; but like most rooms inhabited by old widowed men, it held the spare and faded grayness of a house long without a woman: no curtains or tablecloths, no African violets blooming on the windowsill over the sink, no colorful potholders hanging by the stove, no cheerful rag rugs. No bright grace notes of any description. No softness. All was well-worn spartan utility.

  I transferred our food from the compartmentalized foam trays onto chipped stoneware plates and Allen took two beers from the refrigerator.

  “Here’s to Uncle Jap, then,” he said, lifting his can with a smile that tried to be sardonic and failed miserably.

  “To Mr. Jap.”

  I touched my glass to his can and we began to eat.

  Maybe it was the friendly clink of knife and fork against our plates, the hot hushpuppies, or the rapidly warming air. Or maybe it was only the beer that unlocked Allen’s tongue and set him talking about Mr. Jap and Miss Elsie and Dallas.

  I knew that Allen had been born in Charlotte and that his father was killed in a stock car pileup before he was eight, but I didn’t know that his mother had been the neighborhood punchboard, good-hearted and lazy and never too particular about who supported her. I didn’t know that he used to run away to down here whenever his latest “uncle” got too free with belt or strap.

  “Mama always made them send me back, but sometimes I got to stay for three or four weeks till she could get the money together for my bus ticket. Aunt Elsie was real good to me. That woman made the best lard biscuits in the world, big as bear claws, and she never grudged me a bite. She’d give me clothes that Dallas had outgrowed and take me to town for new tennis shoes ’cause mine always had holes in ’em. And Uncle Jap treated me like I was his.” Allen gave me a crooked smile. “I used to really wish I was, you know?”

  Clean hand-me-downs, new sneakers, all the hot biscuits and molasses a growing boy could eat, plus a male relative who wasn’t a mean drunk. Who would think that this old clapboard farmhouse had once been Eden?

  Allen took another big swallow of his beer.

  “Even after I was grown and Aunt Elsie was dead, Uncle Jap never turned me away from his door.”

  “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in,” I said softly.

  “Yeah,” said Allen, who might not know the poem but had lived its meaning. “This is the only real home I ever had after my daddy died.”

  I could have needled him about making—or not making—homes with any of the women he’d married or fathered children with over the years, but that seemed like pettiness tonight.

  “Uncle Jap and Dallas taught me how to drive before I was big enough to see over the steering wheel. Had to look through it to tell where I was going. I’ll never forget the first load of ’shine I ran with Dallas. He was seventeen, I was twelve. That old Hudson out yonder under the shed? They hollowed out the back seat so we could hide the jars. Four cases of ’em. It wasn’t much of a run, just from the crossroads over to a shot house on the other side of Holly Springs, forty, forty-five miles roundtrip. I was a little nervous going, but everything was cool till coming back through Varina, this town cop pulled up beside us and motioned for Dallas to pull over. Which he did. Only he waited till the cop got out of his patrol car and started walking toward us and then he gunned it. We must’ve been doing sixty-five by the time we got to the railroad crossing there at Forty-Two ’cause I
know for sure all four wheels left the ground.

  “That ol’ cop was pretty good though. He hung right with us all the way down to Harnett County. Dallas finally lost him on them dirt roads around Panther Lake. When we got home and told Uncle Jap about it, the onliest thing he asked us was did we remember to muddy up the license plate? We said yes and he laughed and told Dallas not to get too cocky ’cause next time he might not be so lucky.”

  Allen crushed the flimsy aluminum can in his big fist and went back to the refrigerator. “Another one for you?”

  I shook my head. “You ever bring your kids down here?”

  “Yep. Keith and Wendy Nicole, both.” He popped the top on a fresh beer. The foam bubbled up and wet his mustache. He brushed it away with the back of his hand. “Hell, I even brought Tiffany and her mama by one day and Tiffany’s not even my young’un. But none of ’em ever really took to Uncle Jap. Guess he was too old then.”

  “Or they were too young?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Did you see them this weekend?”

  “See who?” he asked, suddenly wary.

  “Wendy Nicole or Tiffany.”

  “I told you. I went to Greensboro.”

  ‘To see about a car, yeah, I know. But you also went to Charlotte.”

  “Dwight tell you everything he hears?”

  “Enough,” I lied.

  “I swear to God my ass is a blue banana if they hear about it.”

  “If who hear about it?”

  “Sally and Katie, of course.”

  I took a final bite of my flaky catfish fillet while I worked it out. If he’d spent last night with ex-wife Sally in Charlotte and didn’t want her to know he’d been in Greensboro on Saturday, that must mean that Katie—?

  “That man you went to see about a car. Hollyfield?”