Devil on My Heels

by Joyce McDonald

  He shakes his head. “I don’t know. California, maybe. I know a little about growing oranges. Maybe I can get a job.” He lifts a strand of my wild hair and tucks it behind my ear.

  “California!” I can’t believe he’s going to just up and leave. “Chase, don’t do this, okay? Please don’t.”

  Chase gives me a smile full of sadness.

  “There’s got to be another way. Maybe you could find a place of your own over in the next county. Get a job or something.” I curl up close to him. “I can’t do this all by myself,” I whisper. And I know he understands what I mean.

  He kisses the top of my head. “I’ll think about it, okay? Maybe I can stay with a friend of mine over at Florida Southern for a while.”

  Florida Southern is only a few miles from here, so I’m starting to feel a little more hopeful when Chase suddenly leans across me and opens the passenger door.

  When I don’t move, he says, “I have to go, Dove. They’re probably already out looking for me. I promise I’ll call you as soon as I figure out where I’ll be staying.”

  “Someplace not too far from here,” I say as I climb out of the car. “Okay?”

  He gives me that lazy lopsided grin of his and shakes his head. “You make me crazy.”

  I stand on our back porch, watching his T-bird head down the dirt road. “I love you too,” I whisper to the cloud of dust rising from his rear tires.

  I sit in the rocker on the back porch for the next few hours, feeling as if I am the only person left on the planet. After a while a soft orange glow spreads along the horizon. I take off toward the groves.

  I am halfway to the first row of Valencia trees when I hear the back screen door slam shut. Dad stands on the porch holding a mug of coffee in one hand. He looks over at me. I stop walking and wait for him.

  He comes up beside me. “Delia phoned a few minutes ago. She told me what happened last night.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “I’m sorry, Dove. Maybe if I had been there I might have been able to stop them.” Dad takes a swallow of his coffee and we start walking again.

  I want to say, But you weren’t. So it happened. Instead, I give him a shrug. “It’s good you weren’t there,” I tell him. “I mean, I’m glad you weren’t.”

  “How you holding up?”

  “Fine.” I start walking faster. Dad falls into step beside me.

  “Chase okay?”

  “Yes. No thanks to your friends.” I don’t tell him that Chase is thinking about leaving town. I can’t bring myself to talk about that right now.

  “How could you join the Klan?” I ask. “How could you do that?”

  Dad looks away. “It’s complicated,” he says.

  “Complicated? The Klan is about hate, Dad. You don’t seem like a hateful person to me.”

  “It’s not like that, Dove. Most of the folks in these parts, they’re law-abiding, churchgoing family men. They don’t want trouble,” he says. “It’s just lately that things have been getting out of hand. I went to a few of their meetings so I could try to talk them out of this business with Gator, but Travis and Jacob weren’t having any of it. They were worried about the pickers organizing. They figured if they made an example of Gator, the others would back down. I never thought—” He takes a swallow of coffee. He doesn’t finish that sentence.

  I think about all the trucks and cars at Eli’s last night, and how there were only a few left by the time they got to Spudder’s. I want to tell my dad that God-fearing, law-abiding folks don’t let the things that went on last night happen. They try to stop them. They don’t look the other way. But I don’t have any right to be preaching to my dad, not after that day in front of the movie theater. I have to trust that he will figure this out on his own. Maybe he already has.

  “Delia say how Gator’s doing?” I ask him.

  “Holding his own.” Dad rubs his eyes like he’s got a bad headache. “I tried to get her to take him to the emergency room. I said I’d help her, but she doesn’t want to move him.”

  “Delia told me you called her to warn her that Travis and them had Gator,” I tell him.

  Dad nods. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to. I know in my heart he’s trying to make amends.

  We don’t talk for a while. We just walk down the road and try to keep from sinking in the softer sand.

  There are still a lot of oranges on the trees. Usually most of the picking is done by now. But the slowdowns have put everything behind schedule. I don’t expect any of the pickers to show up this morning. Not after what happened last night. The fruit will probably hang on the trees until it rots.

  Dad reaches for an orange. He bounces it up and down in his hand a few times. “Ever hear of the golden apples guarded by the Hesperides? The ones Hercules stole?” He hands me the orange.

  I shake my head. “I don’t think so.” I roll the orange back and forth in my palms. I like the feel of the thick, coarse skin in my hands.

  “They were oranges. That’s what they called oranges, golden apples. It was the fruit of the gods, the fruit of kings and emperors. It was centuries before everyday folks ever tasted one of these. Now anybody can walk into a supermarket and buy himself a can of frozen juice from golden apples, nectar that once only passed the lips of the gods.”

  I think about this for a minute. “It seems to me when the Lord made orange trees, He intended the fruit to be for everybody in the first place. And it’s a good thing it worked out that way,” I tell him. “Otherwise you’d be out of business.”

  Dad burps a little surprised chuckle. “You’re right.” His dimples deepen. A sight I haven’t seen in weeks. It about snaps my heart in two. From the look of things, he is going to be out of business anyway.

  I dig a hole in the orange with my thumb, peel it about halfway, and squeeze the juice into my mouth.

  Dad looks over at the sunrise. “I fired Travis,” he says.

  “I heard.”

  “I’m going over to Winter Hill this morning, see if I can’t hire some pickers to help finish up the season.”

  “Most of the crew leaders got their citrus pickers lined up when the season started. Probably only stoop laborers are left over there now,” I say. “Those folks only pick row crops. They don’t know anything about picking fruit. They could damage the crop without somebody overseeing them.”

  “I can train ’em,” Dad says. “And oversee them. At least until I can find a decent crew leader.”

  “Decent in what way?”

  We’ve come to an open crossroad in the groves where the produce trucks travel. The dirt is packed down harder here. “Somebody who’ll treat the pickers fair,” he says. He looks over at me. “You want the job?”

  I can’t be sure if he’s teasing me or not. But then he grins, and I know he’s just pulling my leg. “I’ll help with the interviewing,” I tell him.

  He nods. “Fair enough.”

  “There’s always Travis’s crew,” I say. “They won’t work for him now, which means they’re all out of a job.”

  “I don’t think they’ll want to work for me either.”

  I shrug. “Maybe if you get a good crew boss for them.” In the back of my mind I’m thinking maybe Eli would like the job. Or maybe Gator, if he decides to stay around here.

  We walk a little farther, not saying much. Overhead, the unpicked oranges glow like bright orange lightbulbs in the morning sun.

  “Last night—none of that would have happened if I’d done something about Travis years ago. I just didn’t see it.” Dad stops walking to finish the rest of his coffee. “You grow up with somebody, you see them the way you always have. Travis was a hell-raiser. But I never thought he was dangerous—that he’d—” Dad shakes his head. “I thought it was an accident—But even if it was, we shouldn’t have covered for him.”

  “It was a hit-and-run,” I remind him.

  Dad waves his hand back and forth. “I know. I know that.”

  “You going
to turn him in?”

  Dad lets out a little snort. “I swear you get more like your mother every day.” He smiles and looks away when he says this, like some memory is lighting him up inside. When he turns back to me, he says, “You never give up, do you?”

  “No.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  “Well, are you?”

  “I don’t know, Dove. There’s other folks to consider.”

  I know he’s thinking about Travis and the Klan and what they might do. Not to him, but to me. I put my hand on Dad’s shoulder. It’s not like I’ve forgotten about the things he has done—or didn’t do. I can tell he’s feeling bad about some of those things. Like me, I figure he’s got his own “Adequate of Hell” to live with.

  “You’re right, there’s other folks to consider,” I say, knowing darn good and well we aren’t talking about the same people.

  27

  Come Friday, I stop in the cemetery on my way home from school. Only today I am not reading poems to dead boys. I am visiting my mother.

  I have been thinking about her a lot this past week. Maybe because of what Dad said in the groves about me getting more like her every day. I don’t know what that means, since I never really knew her. But I would like to find out.

  Last night, after dinner, I asked Dad if we had any photos of her besides the few that made it into the family album— wedding pictures, mostly. The rest are all of me in embarrassing stages of my childhood. It turns out Dad has a whole shoe box full of photographs stashed away on his closet shelf. I dumped them out on my bed and went through every one. My mom was grinning in almost every picture. But my favorite was this photo taken at one of Spudder Rhodes’s Fourth of July barbecues. I can tell it was the Fourth because there are little flags stuck in a cake on a table in the background. Spudder’s wife, Nadine, makes that same cake every year.

  In the photograph Mom is standing behind Spudder, pouring a bottle of soda over his head and laughing up a storm. My dad is sitting next to Spudder with this funny look on his face, kind of horrified and amused at the same time, as if he can’t make up his mind how he feels about the whole thing.

  It’s too bad she died so young. I think I would have liked my mom. I am considering writing a special epitaph for her. I tell her this and then I spend the rest of the afternoon filling her in on what’s been going on these past few weeks. Even in the telling, it’s hard for me to believe all that’s happened— Delia no longer working for us, Dad being in the Klan (well, maybe not for long), Travis Waite turning out to be the person who killed Gus, and Gator almost getting killed. Anybody listening to me would think I was making up a whopper.

  And I tell Mom about Chase and me. I think she would have liked Chase.

  Every now and then I look over my shoulder toward the woods behind the church, half expecting to see Gator and Rosemary coming toward me. But I know that won’t happen. Rosemary is staying at Delia’s for now, helping to take care of Gator, who’s on the mend, thank goodness. I guess I’m a little jealous about Rosemary staying there. I miss Delia something awful. It’s like I have this huge empty space inside me that I can’t fill up. My dad misses Delia too. I can tell, although he hasn’t said so. We haven’t hired another housekeeper yet. We haven’t even talked about it, which is fine with me. I don’t want anyone else.

  School has been the biggest surprise this week. The morning after Travis and them beat up Gator, not one single person in Benevolence High seemed to know about it. And they probably never will. Willy sure wasn’t talking. That’s how it is, I’ve decided. The Klan doesn’t let folks know what it’s up to. They really are the Invisible Empire, like Mr. Stone said. Besides, they’re not about to let folks know there was a showdown with Delia and the pickers and the Klan backed off. So for now, school is pretty much the same. Even Willy Podd has kept out of my way. He’s probably worried I will tell the whole world what happened. And maybe someday I will.

  Yesterday, when I went to visit Delia and Gator, Delia told me that Jeremiah has a lawyer friend who handles civil rights cases. He’s going to look into Gus’s. That doesn’t mean it will come to trial, but at least somebody’s investigating what happened.

  As for Travis Waite, he may be out of a job, but he’s still hanging around. Some say he’s planning to move on. Probably afraid the law will catch up with him one of these days. I hope they do, and I hope they do it before he leaves town.

  If anything, things are pretty quiet around here for now. Maybe a little too quiet.

  When I get home, I sit down on the top step of the back porch and wait for Chase. He is staying at our place for now. It was my dad’s idea. He flat out asked me that morning in the groves what Chase planned to do. I guess he knew Jacob most likely wouldn’t let him back in the house. He was right about that.

  Chase was staying with that friend of his who graduated last year and is going to Florida Southern College, not far from here. He called me the night after he left town to tell me where he was. My dad said to tell Chase he needed someone to help Eli with the pickers, if Chase was interested. So Chase came back, for now, anyway. Jacob Tully has got to be mad as blazes about that. I smile every time I think about it.

  The pickers had no problem coming back to work when they heard Eli was going to oversee things. But Eli’s not too steady on his feet these days. Chase—he’s Eli’s legs for now. He works in the groves every day after school. Sort of like an assistant crew boss. Although it’s just for the rest of this season. Eli and Chase take only a small percentage for each crate the pickers fill. And they don’t withhold money to pay off bills at the camp store. Now the pickers have money in their pockets and can buy their groceries wherever they please, and they don’t have to pay three times more than they would someplace else. So I don’t expect Travis will have that camp store for much longer.

  Every evening since he came here, Chase comes in from the groves to spend a little time with me before dinner. I have an ice-cold pitcher of lemonade waiting for him, like I do now. And while he’s drinking it, I read him poems. I’ve been reading Howl to him. Every so often I look up. He’s watching me, and he’s listening. So far his eyes haven’t glazed over once. I thought this might be because I told him the school board banned the book. I figured that might get his attention. But then yesterday Chase surprised me.

  He said, “This is good stuff, Dove. Raw. You know? I like it.”

  At first I thought he was talking about my lemonade. But then he pointed to the book. I felt a little something stir in that empty space inside me when he said that.

  The ice cubes are starting to melt in the pitcher of lemonade. I see someone coming toward me from the groves. At first I think it’s Chase, but when I squint harder I see it’s my dad. He’s been spending a lot of time out there this week, helping Chase and Eli.

  Dad and I, we’re being real careful with each other these days. It won’t ever be the same between us. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing. We never used to talk much. My dad’s idea of good parenting was to make sure I got my allowance every Saturday. It’s different now. Not better. Not worse. Just different.

  Dad sits on the step next to me.

  “Chase is doing a fine job,” he says.

  I nod. “That’s good.”

  “You heard anything more about Gator?”

  “He’s a little better. I was over at Delia’s yesterday. He was sitting up, reading.” I look over at Dad. “His face is still a mess, though. You know, from the belt buckle.”

  It’s Dad’s turn to nod. “I’ve set up a special pension fund for Delia,” Dad says.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Money she can retire on, if she wants. It should be enough to take good care of her in her old age.”

  “She won’t take it,” I tell him. I am afraid Dad might be trying to bribe Delia not to say anything to the law about what happened to Gus.

  “It’s not a gift, Dove.” He looks over at me, then frowns. “Or a bribe, if that’s what you’
re thinking.”

  I look away.

  “Delia earned this money. It’s like anybody working for a company. The company provides the workers with a pension when they retire.”

  “Well, that’s good, then,” I say. I’m relieved Delia won’t have to go on cleaning houses for the rest of her born days. Although I know Jeremiah would take care of her.

  A cool breeze rustles the leaves of the orange trees and sends the scent of Valencia blossoms our way. I lift my face and breathe in the air.

  “Well, will you look at that,” Dad says. He points toward the sky. “A whooping crane. I’ll be darned. Those things are really rare around these parts.”

  I shade my eyes with my hands, watching the bird. With the sunlight glinting off its glorious white wings—wings tipped with black feathers—it looks like an angel flying overhead.

  Dad and I sit there, gaping in awe, knowing we will probably never see such a sight again for as long as we live. And when I glance back down to earth, with the sun still blurring my vision, I think I see, for the tiniest minute, Chase and Gator laughing and running between the orange trees, kicking up sandy soil with their bare feet, just like we used to do, back when we were kids.

  Acknowledgments

  As often happens, this book began as something quite different several years ago. I have been fortunate to have had a number of people with me throughout its sometimes surprising evolution. They have all made this a memorable journey.

  My thanks to friends who, over the years, have read and commented on other versions of this book: Laurie Halse Anderson, Elizabeth Bennett-Bailey, Pat Brisson, Denise Brunkus, Dorothy Carey, Nancy Evans Cooney, Paula DePaolo, Joan Elste, Judy Freeman, Deborah Heiligman, Martha Hewson, Sally Keehn, Susan Korman, Trinka Hakes Noble, Margie Palatini, Wendy Pfeffer, Penny Pollock (who never stopped believing in this book), Shirley Roffman, Pamela Curtis Swallow, Virginia Troeger, Laura Whipple, Kay Winters, and Elvira Woodruff.

  My gratitude to Karen Wojtyla, whose suggestions and encouragement gave me the courage to take the original story in a new and more challenging direction.