by Peggy Gaddis
Shelley’s eyes widened as Mam’ Cleo put before her orange juice, bacon, eggs, toast and a tall silver pot from which fragrant coffee-steam teased her nostrils. When she had eaten, Mam’ Cleo came back, this time with hot-cakes and tiny home-made sausages. Shelley laughed and shook her head.
“Goodness, no, thank you! It looks delicious, but I’ve had three times my usual breakfast already!” she protested.
Mam’ Cleo gave her a stern look.
“Dat’s how-come yo’ so skinny,” she snapped. “Eatin’ lak’ a bird, folks ‘gin to look lak’ birds.”
She tramped out and Jim grinned at Shelley’s look.
“Pay her no mind. She belongs to the breakfast-big-enough-for-a-field-hand school. Fried steak, cream gravy, tons of hot biscuits, gallons of coffee and the whole thoroughly tamped down with hot-cakes and ‘Gawgia’ molasses,” he told her.
“There were some girls in my outfit who’d have loved her for that! I suppose while I was eating K-rations and things out of a mess kit, any time and anywhere I could, I’d have welcomed her offerings with joy. But I’m a civilian now.”
“I know—confusing and sometimes discouraging, isn’t it?” Jim agreed with her. “I got in the habit of doing what I was told to do, with no nonsense about it, until I got used to having no responsibility beyond obeying orders without questioning their wisdom. But when you get out of uniform and start having to make up your own mind and follow your own decisions, it makes a guy feel funny.”
Shelley nodded soberly.
“The first time I stepped out in civilian clothes, after getting my discharge, I embarrassed myself to tears,” she told him. “I had dreamed of getting out of uniform and into the fanciest, frilliest duds I could lay hands on. I’d got myself all dressed up, and had a luncheon date with a very smooth number, and felt I looked as fragile and un-military as a lily-of-the-valley. And as I walked into the restaurant where I was to meet my date, and he stood up to greet me, two ‘chicken-colonels’ came toward me—” She waved an expressive hand, laughing.
Jim nodded understandingly. “You clicked to ‘attention’ and ripped them off the prettiest little salute they probably ever saw.”
Shelley nodded, and they laughed together.
“My date was newly out of uniform himself, and furious with me. And I was embarassed to tears. But the two ‘chicken-colonels,’ with perfectly straight faces and laughing eyes, returned the salute with all possible formality, except that they both laughed after they passed.”
“I bet you looked cute as the dickens,” said Jim, and stood up. “I guess we’d better get going, now that I remember we both have a very busy day.”
Shelley scrambled to her feet.
“Oh, but you don’t have to bother with me,” she protested.
“Who said I was going to?” asked Jim mildly. “Being sheriff of Harbour Pines is not exactly a playtime job, even if I did think it was going to be when I let them saddle me with it.”
Wide-eyed, Shelley stared at him.
“You’re the sheriff of Harbour Pines?”
Jim eyed her haughtily.
“Wipe that surprised look off your pretty face, madam,” he ordered her sternly. “Strictly speaking, I’m a deputy sheriff. Harbour Pines is not the county seat, nor am I the county sheriff. But believe it or not, I do represent law and order in Harbour Pines, and don’t you forget it, lady!”
“No, sir, I won’t,” Shelley promised meekly, her eyes dancing. “I imagine it must be a terrifically hard job, at that.”
Jim’s grin did not match her own.
“As a matter of fact, it is,” he said slowly. “Chiefly because I’ve known the people, black and white, in these parts all my life. And it isn’t any fun to have to arrest them, any one of them, and cart them off to jail at the county seat, when they get a little out of line for one thing or another. I don’t like arresting a man and breaking up his pathetic little ‘moonshine still’ when I know that he has a wife and kids that will go hungry while he’s ‘doing time’; or one of the Negroes who started out in a friendly little argument and wound up in a cutting scrape. I know, of course, that ‘shining’ is illegal and most of the stuff turned out in these home-made stills is little better than poison, and that cutting scrapes have to be looked upon with a stern and forbidding eye. It has to be done, and I’d rather do it myself, knowing the people and liking them, but it’s not exactly fun!”
“ ‘A policeman’s lot is not a happy one,’ ” Shelley suggested, and he nodded.
“Right!” he agreed grimly.
As they came out into the wide hall, she said quickly, “I’ll get my suitcase.”
“Why?” demanded Jim, and stopped her.
“Because I’m going to my own place.”
“But not for a few days, my girl. It’ll take a week, at least, to make that place fit to live in. Meanwhile, you’ll stay here, of course. And leave us hear no more arguments about it. You’re the most arguing girl I ever met, come to think of it.”
“And you must have been at least a top sergeant overseas—you couldn’t have learned to be so bossy otherwise,” she flashed.
“Right,” said Jim, undisturbed by her flash of temper. “Now let’s get going. I have to take a fellow over to jail at the county seat and I don’t like to keep him waiting.”
His look told her that it wasn’t a pleasant prospect, and she was sorry she had snapped at him, as he helped her into the station wagon and got in beside her.
In front of the building he had pointed out to her yesterday, he brought the car to a halt and swung open the door. Shelley got out, and as he followed her, she turned to him hastily.
“You needn’t go in with me,” she protested.
“The place has been shut up for years. Who knows what sort of ‘varmint’ may have taken up living-quarters in your house? Snakes, maybe,” he suggested pleasantly, and grinned wickedly at her expression.
He thrust a way for them through the weeds and undergrowth up to the small sagging porch of the forlorn little house. He took the key from her shaking fingers and unlocked the door, not seeming to notice that her hands were cold and trembling. He turned the key with difficulty in the cheap, rusted lock and shoved the door open. Damp and decay had made the floor sag a little so that he had to put his shoulder against the door and shove hard to get it open.
“See?” he said over his shoulder. “You couldn’t have managed it alone.”
But Shelley couldn’t answer him. She had drawn herself into a small, cold knot of hard-won self-control. She had wanted desperately to go into this little sad house alone. She had wanted to face the memories, bitter and sweet, without the necessity of maintaining an outward composure she wasn’t at all sure would be possible.
Jim pushed in ahead of her and looked around. The shades were drawn. The house was dark, dank, cheerless with the odor of years of neglect and decay.
Shelley was passionately grateful when Jim, his back to her, went to the windows and lifted the shades, raising the windows so that the warm sun and the soft wind, scented with the pines’ own fragrance, could blow into the room.
Shelley closed her eyes for a moment, her hands clenched tightly in the pockets of her camel’s hair coat. And when at last she made herself open her eyes the full flood-tide of memory swept over her, almost engulfing her, and she had to set her teeth hard in her lower lip until the pain steadied her a little and helped her to fight back the tears.
Had the little house always been this small, this shabby, this dingy? Memory said no fiercely. But memory held days and nights when the little house had been filled to overflowing with love and laughter and happiness. When three people had filled it to the brim with their own delight in each other. There had been poverty, of course, but a poverty faced with such courage and gaiety that it had been a sort of intangible wealth.
Every chair, every scrap of meagre furnishings held its own message for her. And suddenly, in spite of her attempted composure, she was crying so
ftly. And then strong arms were about her, steadying her, holding her close, and Jim’s voice was warm, tender.
“Poor little kid! You just wouldn’t let me warn you, would you? Heaven knows I tried to prepare you for it. I tried to make you understand how impossible the whole thing was, that you were trying to resurrect a ghost. And now that you have, you can’t take it. And who could blame you? You’ll just have to cut your losses and clear out.”
Shelley had herself in hand by now and drew away from him, fumbling for her handkerchief and weakly accepting his when he pressed it into her hand.
“I’m a fool,” she stammered her miserable apology, avoiding his eyes. “It’s just that—well, it isn’t quite what I expected. It’s so old and so shabby.”
“Fifteen years is a long time.”
“But it isn’t going to be so bad, after all. What it really needs is a good, thorough cleaning and some new draperies and slipcovers and things,” she stammered, and Jim stared at her, shocked.
For Pete’s sake, you mean you’re going to stay?”
“Well, certainly I’m going to stay. What else have I been trying to tell you all along? I’ve bought the place, haven’t I?”
He studied her for a long moment and then he lifted his hands palms upward in a gesture of dismissal and sighed.
“Oh, well, I knew from the first that you were a stubborn little cuss,” he yielded. “Come on; I’ve thought of somebody we can get to help you clean the place up. We’ll go find her.”
And without waiting for her answer, he tsrned toward the door.
“Wait until I close the windows.”
“Leave ’em open, and the doors, too. Nobody ever locks a door or a window in Harbour Pines and there’s nothing here anybody would want to steal. Let the air and sunshine in. If any self-respecting burglar did stumble in here he’d probably leave you a donation instead of taking anything.”
Shelley’s cheeks were pink and her eyes flashed, but looking around the forlorn little place, seeing it as he had without any of the rosy tinge of loved memories, she agreed with his dry comment.
He helped her into the station wagon and drove on through what was for want of a better name known as the “town” and into the pine-woods. Some little distance along the road, he turned the station wagon to the left at a trail that was scarcely wide enough for a car, so that low-growing bushes fought the wheels and limbs of large trees slapped spitefully at the side and top as they drove.
The lane came out eventually in front of a house that stood in a small, rude clearing. It was a shabby, forlorn old house that in all its existence had never known the touch of paint. Long years of wind and weather had turned the raw pine boards from which it was built to a deep, dark gray. There was a clumsy-looking chimney at one end, and above what was undoubtedly the kitchen, a length of stovepipe fastened by wires to an upright position pretended to be a chimney from the kitchen stove.
A rickety porch ran along the front of the house, with three broken steps leading up to it. And seated on the edge of this porch there was a gaunt, leather-faced man in ragged overalls who might have been in his thirties. Above him standing on the porch was a thin, haggard-looking woman in a soiled house dress and ragged apron, a wailing baby in her arms. Clustered about the two grownups there were half a dozen dirty-faced, ragged, big-eyed children who broke into small, animal-like wailing at the sight of the station wagon.
The woman flung up her thin, work-worn hand to cover her trembling mouth; but the man grinned ruefully, dropped the home-made cigarette he was smoking, trod on it and said politely, “Mornin’, Jim. Kinda late, ain’t you?”
“A little,” admitted Jim. “Got tied up. Ready, Bud?”
“Reckon I am, Jim.”
The woman whimpered and the man turned a look on her from which she shrank as from a blow, but the whimpering stopped.
“Shet yo’ mouth, Annie,” said the man sternly. “You and the young-’uns git in the house.”
But despite the words and the sternness there was an abashed sort of tenderness in the way he looked at her and then slowly from one to the other of the children, and tears slipped down the woman’s face.
“Sorry about this, Bud,” said Jim almost savagely, his face gray beneath its sun-bronze, his jaw set.
“Sho’, Jim, sho’, I know you are,” said Bud cheerfully. “Reckon it ain’t nobody’s fault but mine. Hadn’t oughter tried it. But a fellow likes to try to do a little somethin’ to keep his woman and young-’uns from goin’ hungry.”
“There was a job for you at the plant,” Jim pointed out.
“Sho’, sho’—but I ain’t never been one to what you might call hone after hard work,” Bud grinned, unashamed.
He was getting into the back seat of the station wagon, and Jim turned to the white-faced woman and big-eyed children.
“I’m mighty sorry about this,” he said gently.
Tears slipped down her white face but she answered him courteously.
“Yessir, I know you are.”
“If I don’t take him in, the sheriff will send somebody over from the county seat, who would maybe make it tougher on Bud than I will. I’ll do my best for him, Annie.”
“Yessir, I know you will, and I thank you. We’re goin’ to miss him, though.”
One of the younger children, awed and bewildered by all that was going on, suddenly wailed, and the woman turned and struck at the child, a weak, ineffectual blow which the child side-stepped so deftly that one knew he was long accustomed to such blows and to such avoidance of them.
“Go up to the commissary, Annie, for whatever you and the children need. The storekeeper will see that you get it. I’ve made the arrangements,” said Jim over his shoulder as he slid beneath the wheel.
“It’s right kind of you, Mr. Jim. I’m purely thankful to you,” said Annie politely, as the station wagon drove off.
As they reached the bend in the narrow lane, Shelley looked back, and wished that she hadn’t. For the tableau on the rickety, sagging porch was one she would not be able soon to forget. The gaunt, white-faced woman, surrounded by weeping, frightened children, the baby clutched in her arms, was the most heartbreaking picture she had seen in a long, long time.
A short distance down the highway, Jim once more followed a lane, this time one that was carefully kept so that the station wagon had no difficulty following it.
Here again there was a clearing in the woods and a shabby old house; but this one stood hip-deep in flowering shrubbery, and the front lawn was dotted with clumps of daffodils and narcissi and there were neatly trimmed peach trees blooming riotously in the back.
There was a chicken yard at the back, and a plump, middle-aged woman in a clean blue dress and a checked gingham apron was scattering food scraps to a flock of handsome, healthy-looking Buff Orpington chickens.
She looked up at the sound of the station wagon, put down the pan and came hurrying over, smiling, wiping her hands on a bit of cleaning tissue in her apron pocket. As she reached the car she caught sight of the man who sat in the back seat and her plump face beneath the old-fashioned “slat” sunbonnet hardened and the eyes behind her old-fashioned golden-rimmed eyeglasses flashed.
“Bud Lively, you good-for-nothin’, worthless creature! Are you off to jail again?”
“Yessum, Miss Hettie—kinda looks like it,” Bud admitted sheepishly.
“Jim Hargroves, you make me so blasted mad!”
The woman turned furiously on Jim.
“Keep your shirt on, Aunt Hettie,” protested Jim wearily. “I figured it was better for me to take him in than to let ’em come and get him. You wouldn’t want Lije Holcomb coming after him, would you?”
“Well, no, I reckon I wouldn’t want Lije Holcomb arresting a yaller dog of mine, not if I liked the dog any,” the woman admitted reluctantly. “But I swear to goodness, Jim, I don’t see how poor Annie and those young-’uns are going to make it without him, worthless and no-’count as he is.”
�
��I tole Annie to go to the commissary for whatever she and the children needed,” Jim admitted.
The woman sighed in exasperation.
“Well, I reckon if it comes to that, she fares better when Bud’s doin’ time than when he’s home stirring up trouble. Only the poor fool grieves so for him, worthless as he is.”
Bud squirmed a little.
“Now, Aunt Het, you hadn’t orter talk like that.”
“Dont you ‘Aunt Het’ me, you good-for-nothing, or I’m liable to do what somebody ought to have done a long time ago. I’d just purely enjoy taking a buggy-whip to you and might’ near skinning you alive!” snapped the woman furiously. And Bud subsided, looking a little uneasy.
Jim interrupted quickly, “Aunt Hettie, this is Shelley Kimbrough. She’s bought the old Harbour Pines Journal and the house that goes with it. The house isn’t fit to live in but she thinks if she could get somebody to help her give it a thorough cleaning—”
Aunt Hettie forgot her age-old grievance against Bud, to turn to Shelley and say with warm, friendly interest, “Well, now, I do declare! I was that put out with Bud being arrested again, I didn’t even notice you had comp’ny with you, Jim. I’m real pleased to meet you, Miss Kimbrough.”
Her warm friendliness was as enveloping as a bright wrap on a cold day, and Shelley reacted to it with a little glow.
“Thank you, Mrs.—”
Aunt Hettie laughed richly, warmly.
“Not Mrs., honey. Miss Jenkins. I never found myself a man, somehow,” she chuckled. And then she glared at Bud, who squirmed a little. “And now that I’ve had time to look over some of the specimens other women found, I see how lucky I am.”
“And you’ll help Miss Kimbrough out, Aunt Hettie?” Jim was plainly anxious to be gone.
“Well, now, Jim, did you ever know me to fail a neighbor? Certainly I’ll help her out. I’ll be plumb glad to. Get out, child, and let Jim get on with taking old No-Good to jail, where he belongs,” said Aunt Hettie briskly. “You and me can go back to town in my old Lizzie.”
Bud was obviously deeply relieved when Jim turned the station wagon, headed back toward the road and said over his shoulder to Shelley, “I’ll pick you up at the shop about six.”