Valentine “Red” Parham—he was a February baby—abused his wife, Ruby, when he drank, which was often. He came by his ways honestly. His father, a choleric one-eyed rounder, used to knock cats senseless, tie their tails together, and drape them over a clothesline for the fun of watching them wake and fight. To put beans on the table Tine ran a log skidder. One Monday, after a violent weekend, an outsize log hung up. Instead of slacking and trying again, Tine impatiently jerked the rig. A snapped, recoiling cable crushed his head like a watermelon.
Velda’s mother, born Amanda Brown, was called Bill by everyone except her husband, Ernest, who called her Billie. A four-year-old Mandy Brown changed her name because she wanted to be a boy, and “Bill” stuck because it was better than her brothers’ corruption of “Mandy” into “Mangy.” Billie Brown Parham, a good-tempered woman, perpetually carried the smell and feel of white flour and brown sugar with her.
Billie worried that her twenty-one-year-old daughter might end up an old maid, but Velda had simply not known anyone interesting enough with whom to spend one night, much less a lifetime. Boys paid court, but she was distant to most and rude to some, so none persisted. Oliver was the first to mesh with her desires and dreams, none of which included birthing a houseful of mountain children and growing old at forty-five.
Velda’s aunt Ruby had been postmistress at Ola for three years when Tine was killed. After Velda’s father died, Billie, Velda, and Ruby banded together as postmistresses and storekeepers. “Sisters,” they called themselves, “building a family business.”
The afternoon when Oliver had first stopped in Little Cataloochee, the week before Zeb’s trial, Velda had been alone in the post office. She’d perked her ears upon hearing his Ford and had decided to looksee out back on a trip for firewood instead of aping through the window. She watched a tall, thin, well-dressed man a little older than she fuss with a pair of long-cuffed driving gloves. After he came in the keeperless front, she made an entrance at the back. Smiling, she dropped firewood into the box, removed her denim jacket, and arched her back. Running a hand through her dark straw-colored hair and tossing her head, she said, “Welcome, stranger,” holding out her hand. “I’m Velda Parham.” He seemed to appreciate the performance.
His handshake said he was neither acquainted with hard labor nor afraid to touch a woman. He didn’t stay five minutes, but when she hinted he might visit, he beamed. After he left, she watched him from the window, putting those silly gloves back on and whistling some tune she couldn’t hear.
Her mind raced. They would fit together nicely. He was close to handsome, with a crooked smile just this side of mischievous. It didn’t hurt that lawyers were smart and made money. He didn’t sound like he hailed from Cataloochee, nor would stay long. Her mother could go with them, leaving Ruby to run the family business. Settled, except for how long it might take to seal the bargain.
“Velda, that young man was nice,” said Billie Parham, “but I didn’t understand half of what he said. Where’s he from?” Velda and Billie were home after Oliver’s presentation, Billie to sweep, dust, and wonder how to spend the nine hundred dollars the commission had offered for their property. She had never seen fifty dollars in one place, so she fairly tingled with delight at the offer. Velda had more than money on her mind as she brushed her hair at the bedroom dresser.
“Way down east, Mama. Near about at the ocean.”
“Wonder if they all talk like that.” She wore a full-length apron over the Sunday dress she had worn to the meeting.
Velda kept brushing. The sun emerged, highlighting her dark hair and reflecting off the japanned hairbrush.
“You looked like you could eat him up. I hope folks don’t talk. Girl, what do you know about him?”
“Just what people say, Mama. That he’s smart, and rich, too. They say Mrs. Banks gave him a lot of money for getting Zeb off.”
“Pshaw. Hannah needn’t have bothered. No jury in the world would’ve sent Zeb to the chair. I could have got him off myself.”
“Mama, you aren’t a lawyer.”
“It don’t take a paper from Chapel Hill to know right from wrong.” She walked into the bedroom and laid hands on Velda’s shoulders. “Even if I did make it, that dress looks good on you.” It was dark green with a high collar and a little flounce to the sleeves. She watched her daughter in the mirror. “Don’t believe you’ve looked this happy in a while.”
“It’s not so much happy, Mama, as it is dreamy.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve dreamed of something for a long time, and now I see how it can happen. Like God’s shown me the way.”
“You mean that young man.”
Velda nodded.
“Child, a good-looking man his age is likely spoken for. And if not, he’s played the field so long he’s not worth having. You’re barking up the heartbreak tree.”
Velda stopped brushing. “Mama, it isn’t that way with him.”
“How do you know?”
“I can feel it.” She patted Billie’s hand. “Can’t you, Mama?”
“I’d like to. And I believe I hear the door.”
Velda jumped like a jack-in-the-box. “Mama, wish me luck.”
Billie took the hairbrush and hugged her daughter. “Luck and happiness is all I’ve ever wished for you.”
Velda fairly skipped into the front room and opened the door. Oliver proffered a bouquet of asters and zinnias from Mattie’s hothouse. “For you, Miss Velda.”
“You shouldn’t have,” said Velda, sniffing them. “Mama, where can we put these?”
Billie arranged the flowers in a fluted green vase and set it on the mantel. “Mr. Babcock, these are beautiful. Thank you so much.”
“My pleasure, Mrs. Parham. I hope you are well.”
“I’m able to sit up and take nourishment, young man. Will you stay for supper?”
Velda nodded to Oliver.
“I would be honored.”
“I’ll get it ready while you two visit.” As Billie headed to the kitchen, Velda gestured for Oliver to sit in one of the upholstered chairs before the fireplace. They sat edgily, as if awaiting a starter’s gun.
Oliver cleared his throat and asked Velda’s favorite color, and when she said blue, he allowed that was his, too. A half hour later they had established compatibilities galore. But when Oliver waxed poetic about oysters, she paused.
“Velda, is something wrong?”
“I’ve never seen an oyster—least not the kind you’re talking about.”
“Oh, they’re simply divine. You eat them raw, and as cold as you can get them. They taste of salt spray and sunshine. I admit, they look strange—Swift said the first to eat an oyster was a bold man—but once you get past the look and feel, it’s good to eat a bucketful. Now you said, I think, there’s another kind of oyster?”
She blushed and looked at the floor. “Well, I’ve never eaten one, but men talk about—mountain oysters.”
“Tell me about them.”
“I shouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“They come from the he cattle—you know…”
After being puzzled for a second, Oliver grinned. “You mean when they make steers out of bulls?”
“We should change the subject.”
Oliver did so, and enthralled her for an hour as he told of boyhood, travels, and good times at the university. Billie brought a stoneware pitcher of cider and a matching plate stacked with sugar cookies, and sat with the couple as Oliver told about a professor.
“He knew everything, not only British history, but also mathematics and philosophy and law. Wore tweeds, used a cane for a pointer. English accent. I always wondered where he was born. One day he was telling about Richard the Third, the king who killed the princes, when he suddenly paused, like he’d lost his memory. We looked up in consternation. Suddenly he remembered the word he was looking for, finished his sentence, then said ‘Even a blind hog’ll find an acorn ever now and th
en,’ as country as you please. After the lecture he told me he was from Rockingham County! I never would have guessed it in a hundred years.”
Billie chuckled. “That’s a funny story, Mr. Babcock.”
“Please, ma’am, call me Oliver.”
She hesitated, then smiled. “All right, Oliver. Have I missed your telling Velda about your church?”
“No, ma’am. I haven’t mentioned it. Would you like to know about my religious life?”
They nodded as one. “Yes indeed,” said Billie.
“I belong to the Presbyterian church, U.S., which, as you know, is the southern branch, formed in 1861 as the War of Northern Aggression began. I keep membership in the little congregation in my hometown, although I attended the university church in Chapel Hill.”
“What do Presbyterians believe in?” asked Billie. “All we have around here is Baptists and Methodists.”
“It’s probably very similar to your beliefs,” said Oliver. “We sprinkle for baptism, like Methodists, and most believe in predestination and election, but otherwise it’s pretty similar.”
“What’s that? Reverend Noland’s never preached about predestination.”
“It says certain of mankind have been elected by God to be saved or damned—and there’s nothing one can do to change that. No, excuse me, ma’am, that’s election, but predestination is similar. If you get up in the morning and stub your toe, predestination says you were meant to do that from the beginning of time.”
“That’s nonsense,” said Billie. “All that means is you stub your toe.”
“I agree, ma’am, but a strict Calvinist will say he’s glad he got that over with.”
Billie and Velda missed the joke entirely. “But you believe in Jesus?” Billie asked.
“Absolutely, ma’am. As the gospel says, ‘without Him was not anything made that was made.’”
Velda smiled. “Oliver, do you believe people are predestined to meet?”
He nodded to Velda. “A myriad of words could describe that, Miss Velda. People are predestined, foreordained, star-crossed, fated, determined, however you might put it. But I also, as I said, believe in free will, which some think makes predestination look awfully like happenstance, or serendipity, simply random occurrences. But I will say this. But for my birth, my journey to the university, and my acquaintance with Senator Squires, I would not be in this room with you lovely ladies this afternoon. Either it just happened that way, which I tend to doubt, or it was meant to be. For whatever reason, I’m very happy to be here.”
Were it not for Billie’s presence, he would have held his hand out to Velda, whose expression hovered somewhere between swoony and ecstatic.
Billie stood. “I’m going to finish up supper.”
“Do you need any help?” asked Velda.
“No, you two get some fresh air. I’ll call you when it’s ready.”
The couple put on their jackets and went outside. Billie watched from the kitchen window as her daughter wrapped her arms around Oliver’s arm as they walked toward the road. “Jesus,” she prayed quietly, “stay near us all.”
CHAPTER 6
You Might Have to Trust Them
Hiram Carter had built his new house away from the main road because that road followed the creek, and he would not clutter adjacent bottomland with a thing as unproductive as shelter. For like reason the family cemetery lay notched into a mountainside. The view from the footbridge that crossed the creek was of a house crouched against Nellie Ridge like it might welcome a laurel slick to veil its face from the passing world.
The house’s most striking feature was an asymmetrical roof, a marriage of gable, hip, and valley, like a person stacking several hats on her head, the uppermost a tiny overseas cap. A gable at the end of the otherwise linear north side lent an air of a girl arching a left eyebrow. A porch began four feet from the east corner, made an ell in the west, and ended at the south. The front door opened into a central hall stocked with a mirror, a half dozen coat hooks, and a cherry case clock.
Hiram had made the clock in 1880, a present for his new wife Mary’s nineteenth birthday. They had been married four months, and about all they’d owned was a sizeable debt on a good-size farm, and love. But Hiram had swapped two hams for the works; had milled, planed, and polished the case; and had decorated it with two hand-carved flowers that, given some imagination, were rosebuds. Aunt Mary had presided over family meetings backgrounded by its tick and chime since Hiram’s death two years before.
They opened the house to company Friday, a day that dawned foggy after a circle had surrounded the moon the night before. Horace Wakefield brought briefcase and hat, and the Carters carried covered dishes. Any time the family gathered, whether for wedding, funeral, or lesser occasion, food appeared according to an unarticulated formula that somehow resulted in the proper ratio of deviled eggs to biscuits, ham to applesauce cake.
Aunt Mary’s older son, Manson, forty-three, resembled his father, Hiram, with a high bald forehead surrounded by thick black hair. A droopy mustache counterpointed his usually dour expression. His brother, Thomas, seventeen months his junior, had Mary’s people’s abundant brown hair and prominent ears. Neither son was interested in romance, preferring the music of baying coon dogs to that of fiddles at dances. They treated their mother as if she were the queen of Sheba because they loved her, and, as Manson said, “If we didn’t, Papa’d haunt hell out of us.”
They welcomed Hiram’s nephew Levi Marion Carter, and his family, a little after three o’clock. Levi Marion was a man with a reputation for hard work in a place where all worked themselves nearly to death every day. He was blue-eyed and prolific—his and Valerie’s seven children ranged from teenagers to a knee baby.
Valerie’s maiden name was Brown. Her father said the Good Lord hadn’t thought enough of the Browns to make but one set, so she had to be a cousin of Billie Brown Parham. She and Levi Marion were forty-six—he was about six months her senior—but she looked a decade older. She had strong brown eyes and wielded a wicked hickory switch.
Perhaps twenty folks milled in the front room, smoking, conversing of weather—last night’s moon brought talk of cold rain and early winter—and the upcoming feast, in tones more funereal than festive. Horace, wearing a red and blue plaid flannel shirt, laid out papers on the long table in two unequal stacks, while Aunt Mary gathered the family by ringing a small silver bell, a present Hiram had traded for on a produce run to South Carolina.
Her hair had been dark with red highlights in the former century, but she was now sixty-seven, and it shone as white as bleached muslin, in a bun secured by a tortoiseshell pin that formerly might have sported a bright ribbon or flower. After Hiram’s death, she had worn black from head to toe.
“Listen,” she said, setting the bell on the mantel, “we’re here to see what Mr. Wakefield has to say. No matter who he works for, he deserves a fair hearing.” She fingered a brooch at her throat. “Mr. Wakefield, the room is yours.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Carter.” He cleared his throat and looked at the crowd, dressed for solemn occasion. My shirt is too gay, he thought, but there is no help for it. “I won’t waste your time,” he continued. “I will answer questions and help your decisions. Nobody in this process wants misunderstanding or ill feelings.”
He smiled and passed hands, priest-like, over the table. “Here are two sets of papers. On the left is the stack to sign if you choose to sell and leave. Here are those to use if you stay—more paper because it’s more complicated. That’s your choice—sell and leave within a short time, or take a lifetime lease at a lower figure. Are there questions?”
Levi Marion’s faded blue eyes floated over dark semicircles. “Tell us about the lifetime thing.”
“You sell to the commission. They convey the land to the government, which leases it back for your lifetime, which one would hope is long. Then the government assumes full title.”
“Just me, or both of us?”
Horace l
ooked through his papers. “It’s deeded jointly, so yes, both of you.”
“So if I died, she could stay on?”
“Until her death, yes, sir.”
“We could farm like always?”
Horace pushed a strand of hair off his forehead. “With restrictions, of course.”
“Could we keep our summer pasture on the balds?”
“No, sir, that is one of the restrictions, I’m afraid.”
The clock struck the quarter hour as Levi Marion scowled at Horace. “Then we might as well go out of the cattle business. Keeping them year-round down here, we wouldn’t have room to grow nothing.”
Manson and Thomas had penned their dogs, mostly Plotts but also a few Walkers and black-and-tans, for the meeting’s duration. They did not bark at familiar company, but they suddenly started to raise hell. Thomas glanced outside but saw no reason for their excitement.
Valerie rubbed the corner of her eye. “What if we get too old to work?”
“Your children could farm until you both pass. Then they would have to leave. Immediately.”
Thomas, still worried about the dogs, went to the window. He saw nothing out of the ordinary but decided to walk outside. On the porch he found muddy boot prints he was pretty sure had not been made by anyone inside. Whoever this was had walked from the woodlot and slouched briefly on the edge of the porch, perhaps to spy.
Thomas looked around. The dogs had not stopped barking but were less urgent. He surveyed this side of the property and saw nothing strange except the boot prints. In the yard he realized who had made them and why the dogs were upset.
“McPeters,” he muttered.
The center of the left heel print sported an X, a mark that Willie McPeters had worn since a youth. No one knew if such decoration was meant to ward off bad luck, or whether, as some said, the devil himself had studded that boot with crossed nails.
“Where’d he go?” Thomas asked the hounds, by this time quiet enough but still with raised hackles. That the tracks went close to the dog pen meant McPeters had been unafraid of them. “Wonder if he was carrying that rifle gun,” Thomas said.
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