Long Upon the Land

by Margaret Maron

  Her father’s truck was parked by the back porch. He himself had just finished his own supper and was sitting on an old metal glider to hand-feed a few scraps to Ladybelle and Speck, the bluetick that Robert gave him after Blue died last year. Bandit hopped out and the dogs touched noses, smelled bottoms, and then wandered out into the yard when it was clear that there were no more scraps for them.

  Kezzie tipped his straw panama back on his head and gave them a welcoming smile that turned to puzzlement as Deborah sat down next to him on the glider and took her fingers through his. Dwight sat down on the top step of the porch.

  “Y’all are looking mighty serious,” he said. “Something wrong? Where’s your boy?”

  “Kate took him with them to the beach for the week,” Deborah said.

  “It’s about Vick Earp, Mr. Kezzie,” said Dwight.

  “The dead man we found?”

  “Yessir. You recognized him, didn’t you?”

  “Thought it might be one of them Earps, but won’t sure which one.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us, Daddy?” Deborah asked, momentarily forgetting that she was supposed to be listening, not talking.

  He withdrew his hand, reached into his shirt pocket for cigarettes, and struck a match to light it. “Me and the Earps never got along too good. Sammy Earp used to own that part of the land near Black Gum Branch.”

  “Vick Earp’s grandfather?” asked Dwight.

  Kezzie nodded.

  “Sammy won’t much of a farmer, but he knowed how to make good whiskey and we had an arrangement. Then he started drinking it, got into debt, owed me a lot of money. Land out here in the county won’t worth much back then and he kept cutting me off a few acres till by the time he died and his boys got up in size, there won’t but just a little bit down by the branch where I found Vick. Joby, he was Sammy’s oldest. Me and him’s about the same age. He didn’t know Sammy’d deeded me so much of the land. I let them boys keep farming it after Sammy died and Joby thought the whole place was his. When I finally told him he owed me rent money, he got it in mind that I’d cheated his daddy out of their farm. He started bad-mouthing me around the community, but I let it ride till he—”

  He broke off to take another drag on his cigarette.

  “Till what, Mr. Kezzie?” asked Dwight.

  He blew out a long stream of smoke and turned to look at Deborah. “You remember that time down by the creek after you lost that first election and you asked me if I ever killed anybody?”

  She nodded. “I remember.”

  “You remember what I said?”

  She didn’t answer and he turned back around to face Dwight. “I told her that I wanted to a couple of times and meant to once, but never did. And that’s as true today as it was then.”

  “Mr. Kezzie—”

  He raised his hand to stop Dwight. “Hear me out, son. I know who it was stuck that pine cone up the Clarion’s backside, trying to make it sound like I killed Vick Earp. It was Joby Earp. Same man I meant to kill and didn’t all those years ago.”

  The glider creaked on its rusty springs as he leaned back, took a deep drag on his cigarette, and let memory carry him back across the years.

  December 27, 1945

  For the second time in two days, Sue drives down the bumpy dirt lane to that abandoned tenant house and soon has a fire going in the old stone hearth. Dry pine cones, dead limbs, and pieces of the old collapsed siding all burn readily. The house had been built from heart pine, so the smoke billowing from the chimney is nice and black; and she is pleased to see it rise straight up in the still December air.

  That end of the room still has part of the roof and three walls, and the fire soon warms the area around the hearth. She spreads one of those freshly laundered blankets on the floor in front of the fire, and settles onto the blanket with the legal documents she and Zell had registered at the courthouse first thing this morning.

  She does not expect to wait long and sure enough, Kezzie Knott’s truck soon trundles down the lane. He pulls up beside her car and rolls his window down.

  “I thought somebody’d set this place on fire,” he calls.

  Without getting up, she calls back, “Can’t hear you.”

  He frowns at that, but gets out of the truck and walks over to the ruined house. “I thought this place was on fire.”

  “No, just keeping warm, but I’m glad you came. Maybe you can help me?”

  “Help you do what?”

  “The other day, you said your boys know your farm’s boundaries. Could you show me mine?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “The boundaries of this farm. It’s mine.”

  “Your’n? What about your sister? Ain’t her name on the deed, too?”

  She is not surprised that he would know that, but merely says, “Not anymore. I bought her half.”

  It has cost her all the accrued rent money and her half of the new car that was their joint Christmas present, but she doesn’t tell him that.

  “We registered the new deed this morning, but I can’t decide where the corners are.”

  She spreads out the deeds that have passed down through the years from father to son and finally to a daughter. Her grandmother. The earliest one is dated 1764 and encompasses nearly 2,000 acres. By the end of the Civil War, the holding had been reduced to its present 114 acres and in addition to a written description of those final boundaries, there is a map hand-drawn by some long-dead surveyor. “I can see where it touches the creek, but where would that holly tree be?”

  Reluctantly, Knott steps up into the ruined house and sits on his heels to look at the deeds. He turns the map to orient himself and while he studies it, she studies him.

  A two-day growth of beard stubbles his strong chin and jawline and his deep-set eyes are a clear blue. A lock of wavy brown hair has escaped his hat to fall across his brow and she finds herself wanting to brush it back.

  “That holly tree’s the beginning of my land,” he says. “Ain’t nothing left of it now but the stump. I hammered in a iron pipe there when I got that piece from the Earps.”

  He picks up the 1764 deed. “Joseph Grimes? That must be why they still call it Grimes land on all the deeds. You come down from him?”

  Sue nods.

  The first Grimeses arrived in Virginia in 1703 and some of them eventually worked their way down to North Carolina. Her mother is a proud member of both the Daughters of the American Revolution and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Sue herself has never seen the point of resting on an ancestor’s laurels and rather suspects that Joseph Grimes might well have been one of those Englishmen who were given the choice between transport and debtor’s prison.

  “My granddaddy got our homeplace from this ’un,” he says, pointing to one of the post–Civil War deeds.

  “And you’ve added to it?”

  “Figured I might as well since they ain’t making no more land.” He sticks the deed with the map in the pocket of his brown work jacket and stands. “Come on then and I’ll show you what’s your’n.”

  “Are you sure you have time? I don’t mean to take you away from your work.”

  He shakes his head. “I set my own hours.”

  She reaches up and after a slight hesitation, his hand takes hers to help her to her feet. She’s wearing a short wool jacket and corduroy slacks tucked inside a pair of sturdy leather boots. As they pass the dilapidated curing barn, he reaches inside for a couple of tobacco sticks and hands her one. She did enough rough hiking yesterday to know a stick will come in handy for pushing aside briars and low-hanging branches.

  At the creek, they turn east to follow its run to where her land ends at Black Gum Branch.

  “Never knew that little branch had a name,” she says. “Where’s the black gum tree?”

  “Probably blew down years ago.” He points to a moss-covered stump. “I believe that might be what’s left of it.”

  The branch peters out in a low marshy spot and after some poking around
with his tobacco stick, he locates another iron stob. Due north from there, they come to the dirt road and cross it to walk along the western side of a cotton field. The dead stems hold empty bolls that still have wisps of cotton clinging to them.

  “This ought to’ve been cut in last month,” he said and she hears the disapproval of a good farmer.

  “You really do farm, too?” she asks.

  Till then, he’s stayed a pace or two ahead of her. Now he turns. “What do you mean, too?”

  She shrugs. “My father told me why you went to prison and you’re still making it, aren’t you?”

  He glares at her, then heads south again without answering.

  “Are you ashamed to answer?” she asks.

  It’s not a taunt, but it makes him face her again. “I ain’t ashamed of nothing I do, Miss Stephenson, but that ain’t none of your business.”

  “It is if you’re making it on my land.”

  That stops him. “I ain’t making it on your land.”

  “Maybe not right now, but you have in the past, haven’t you? I was out here yesterday and I walked the creek over toward your line. Looked to me as if somebody had a still there back in the summer.”

  “And you’d know what a still site looks like?”

  “I’m not stupid, Mr. Knott. I could see where a fire had been built. Bricks and rocks to hold the heat in beneath some sort of large vessel. A few pieces of firewood scattered around.”

  “Could’ve been some hunters looking to stay warm.”

  She laughs out loud at that and his own lips twitch before he turns. The field ends but he keeps on walking, breaking a trail through blackberry briars and wax myrtles out into a stand of longleaf pines new to her. A thick carpet of pine needles has smothered out the usual underbrush and there is nothing to block her view of this open expanse. She catches her breath at the way the morning sun streams through those high branches, sending down shafts of pure golden light between the tall, straight trunks of the pines, and he pauses to watch her.

  “Is this mine?” she whispers, awed by the beauty. “Really, truly mine?”

  He smiles at her. “Real pretty, ain’t it?”

  Impulsively, she stands on tiptoe, pulls his head down, and kisses his stubbly cheek.

  Startled, he takes a step back and stares at her.

  She laughs. “Don’t think that means anything. That was just to thank you for showing me this.”

  “Yeah?” Without warning, he wraps his arms around her and kisses her full on the lips. “That’s to say you’re welcome.”

  Before she can react, the bark on the pine tree next to his head explodes in a shower of sharp chips that sting their faces. A split second later, the sound of the rifle reaches their ears.

  He pulls her to the ground just as another bullet hits the pine trunk where their heads were only an instant ago.

  “Hey!” he yells. “People here! Hold your fire!”

  He looks down at her. “You okay?”

  She nods.

  “Fool hunter,” he growls. “He could’ve killed us.” He shouts across the clearing, “Hey, you! Who’s that shooting?”

  No one answers.

  “Stay down,” he says, then sprints across the open expanse in the direction the shots came from and crashes through the bushes at the far side.

  It’s a good five minutes before he comes back. “Took to his heels,” he tells her as he helps her to her feet. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she says, “but your cheek—you’re bleeding.”

  She reaches out with her handkerchief, but he moves away from her touch and pulls out his own handkerchief to blot up the blood.

  “A tree branch caught me. Ain’t but a scratch,” he says. “We need to finish up here. Your south corner’s down yonder.” He turns and sets off at such a fast pace that she almost has to run to keep up with his long legs.

  She’s full of questions about that kiss, those rifle shots, and why he’s suddenly so anxious to be gone. But she only asks about the shots.

  “Somebody was hunting on my land without asking,” he says. “Reckon that’s why he took off.”

  “Your land? You own that?”

  Past the stand of pines, he points to three slash marks on the north side of a huge old water oak. “That shows that your line runs on this side of the tree. Mine’s on the other side.”

  She nods but doesn’t speak and they finish walking the boundary in silence.

  Back at the ruined house, he immediately heads for his truck.

  “I brought sandwiches,” she says, reaching for a picnic basket in her car. “Enough for both of us.”

  “Thank you kindly, Miss Stephenson, but dinner’ll be waiting for me at my house and I got something that needs doing first.”

  “My name is Sue,” she says.

  “You’re Lawyer Stephenson’s girl. It ain’t fitting for me to call you that.”

  “I kissed you, Kezzie. And you kissed me back.”

  “That won’t fitting neither.” He opens the door of his truck and steps in.

  “I’ll be here tomorrow,” she calls.

  “Well, I won’t,” he says.

  And he isn’t, even though black smoke rises from the chimney all morning.

  Nor does he come the next three mornings.

  On the fifth morning, he has the fire going before she gets there.

  CHAPTER

  11

  If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.

  — Romans 12:18

  He was quiet for so long, that I touched his arm and said, “Why, Daddy? Why would you want to kill him?”

  He sighed and seemed to pull himself back to the present. “Your mama and me’d just met and I was showing her the boundaries of her land out here when somebody took a couple of potshots at us.”

  “Joby Earp?”

  His cigarette had burned down almost to his finger and he stubbed it out in the ashtray on the arm of the glider. “Come this close to hitting her.”

  He held his thumb and index finger less than an inch apart and I saw remembered anger flare in his blue eyes. “We never timbered that stand of pines ’cause your mama loved them too much, so I could show you the very tree. Still got one of Joby Earp’s bullets in it. He took to his heels when I ran after him, but I knowed it was him.” His voice turned as harsh and cold as I’d ever heard. “Beat the tar out of him when I finally caught up with him that evening and yeah, I’d’ve killed him if somebody hadn’t pulled me off so he could get away.”

  He held up his fingers again. “This close them bullets came, Deb’rah. Any closer and Sue—”

  He took a deep breath, then fumbled in his shirt pocket for his Marlboros.

  “Won’t too long after that, the revenuers caught him. He couldn’t pay a lawyer so he spent the next three months in jail.”

  I wasn’t going to ask how Joby Earp got caught, but I realized that this must have been when my grandfather stopped representing him.

  “I’d’ve run him off the land right then, but by the time he got out, me and Sue was married and Joby’s wife come and begged her to get me to let bygones be bygones. Earla was a good woman with a hard row to hoe and Sue felt sorry for her. She’d took in his brother’s boys to raise, so I backed off, even gave the oldest boy—Vick—a chance to work for me. He won’t as good a driver as he thought he was, though, and didn’t want to be told. Always picking fights with your brothers.

  “Them Earps got to be such a thorn in my side that I offered Joby more than the land was worth to buy him out, but he wouldn’t take it ’cause he knowed how it irked me to have them squatting there. So I just bided my time, waited till I heard he needed money real bad, then got somebody from the other end of the county to make him an offer. I got it for right much less than I’d offered Joby. Made him cuss me even more when he figured it out. Reckon Vick and Tyler grew up thinking they’d been cheated outten what was theirs.”

  H
e flipped back the top of his Marlboro box. One cigarette remained. No matches, though.

  “I’ll get you a match,” I said and slipped into the kitchen for some. I had Mother’s lighter in my pocket, but was still a little hesitant about letting him know that it was mine now.

  He thanked me and the glider squeaked as he sat back and lit up. “First few years atter they moved, them boys used to sneak out here to fish in the creek, maybe shoot ’em a rabbit or two. Thought I didn’t know. But I usually heard about it. Long as that was all they did, I never said nothing. It ain’t easy knowing the land your people sweated over, maybe fought and died for, ain’t never gonna be yours again. I felt sorry for ’em, but it was Joby and Sammy they needed to be mad at, not me.”

  “You have anything to do with him going to prison in June?” Dwight asked.

  “Is that what he’s saying?”

  “’Fraid so.”

  “Guess that’s why—” He broke off and took a long drag on his cigarette.

  “Why what?” I asked. “Why some of John Claude’s regulars have needed his services lately?”

  Daddy turned to Dwight. “’Bout now’s when you’re gonna ask me if somebody can say was I here all Friday night and you know there ain’t. Maidie’ll say she’d of heard if anybody come up or if I’d gone somewhere in my truck. She says she don’t sleep as sound as she used to, but it’d just be her word.”

  I almost had to smile. Maidie came to work for Mother when she was a teenager, met and married Cletus Holt, and had stayed on as Daddy’s housekeeper after Mother died. Their house lay on the other side of the dog pens and garden, only a few hundred feet away, but Daddy could have driven his old truck past their house with a brass band playing in the back and both of them would swear he hadn’t set foot off the place all night if they thought that was what he wanted.

  “When’s the last time you saw Vick Earp?” Dwight asked.

  Daddy shrugged. “Might be six or eight years, at least. Saw Joby last year at a fish fry. He kept his distance, but I knowed he still held a grudge against me. Yeah, I was the one let the feds know where to find his still back when he shot at us, but that’s the only time. If he’s thinking I had aught to do with this last time, he’s wrong. All the same, I reckon he’s gonna try to sling as much mud on you and Deb’rah as he can.”