by Ann B. Ross
Etta Mae suddenly grabbed my arm. “Look at that!”
“What? Where?”
“Right over there,” she said, pointing. “See it? It’s a chimney, looks like. You reckon somebody lives out here?”
By squinting through the tree limbs I managed to see the top of a rock chimney. “Oh, Etta Mae, you scared me to death. No, nobody lives out here. Sam said he thought there was an abandoned farmhouse on the place, and I expect that’s what’s left of it.”
“Let’s go see,” Latisha said, and I had to hold her back from ducking under the limbs and taking off.
“No, we don’t have time to explore. You stay with us. Besides, it could be dangerous. There could be a hole where a cellar was, and old boards with nails in them, and . . .”
“Snakes,” Etta Mae whispered.
Rain was one thing, but snakes were another. “Give me your hand, Latisha. I want you close by.”
“Well,” she said, taking my hand, “I’m about to get tired of this. When will we get to wherever we’re going?”
“It’s not much farther,” Etta Mae said. “At least I don’t think it is. Actually, though, we might ought to start being more careful. We could run right up on him.”
“Yes, and being quiet, too. See, Latisha, we just want to find out what a certain somebody is up to. And we’d like to do it without him knowing anybody’s watching. We’ll stay in the bushes and see what he does.”
Latisha considered this for a second, then used her shoulders to slip between two small shrubs. “You mean,” she said, “we gonna sneak up on him, then squat down and watch till he do what he ain’t s’posed to do. But then what we gonna do?”
Etta Mae started giggling. “Good question, Latisha. Miss Julia, you be thinking about that while I push on ahead. I’ll scout things out while you two rest a bit. Oh, and,” she said, “turn on your flashlight and aim it at the ground so I can find my way back to you. I’ll keep mine off ’cause I think we’re pretty close.”
Except for the rain dripping off the trees onto leaves farther below, it got real quiet after Etta Mae was out of sight. Covered in that army green poncho, she was like a point man on a raid as she slipped without a sound through the undergrowth. I held tightly to Latisha’s hand, noticing that she kept edging nearer to me. I leaned against a tree, thinking how much I longed to sit down. If the ground hadn’t been sopping wet, I would have.
“Miss Lady?” Latisha said, her piercing voice mercifully toned down a notch or two. “I got to go to the bathroom.”
Well, come to think of it . . . but with an effort of will, I refused to think of it.
“You think you can wait? We’ll be back at Etta Mae’s trailer before long.”
“I don’t believe I can. But don’t worry, it’s just number one an’ I can do that in a hurry.” She pushed aside her raincoat and began pulling down her shorts, jiggling a little in her haste.
“Wait, wait a minute, Latisha.” I carefully aimed the flashlight around, searching for a clear spot. If I let her crouch down in poison ivy, Lillian would never forgive me. “Okay, right here. Hurry now before Etta Mae gets back.”
She did, then looked up at me. “I need some paper.”
Oh, Lord, my pocketbook, full of Kleenex, was in the car trunk. I searched through the pockets of my raincoat and came up with a wadded tissue, left over from the time of the last rain. No telling how old it was, but I handed it to her and she used it.
“What do I do with it now?” Latisha asked, still in a squat.
“Just leave it. It’ll be all right.”
“That’s litterin’!” she said, and I wondered again what she and Lloyd were learning in school—if it wasn’t anti-littering, it was an anti-snack or anti–fast food or anti–something else campaign. Teach them to read and be done with it, I thought.
“Sh-h-h, not so loud, honey. Now, Latisha, we have two choices: you can put that wet Kleenex in your pocket and take it home to be disposed of correctly, or you can just leave it.”
“Well, in that case,” she said, “I’ll just put it under a rock so nobody’ll know what I been doin’.” Then, with a little help from me, she pulled up her step-ins and her shorts, straightened out her raincoat, then said, “I feel lots better.”
Etta Mae suddenly materialized out of the shadows. Latisha yelped, then covered her mouth to stifle the sound.
“We’re not far from him,” Etta Mae whispered. “Y’all all right?”
“We’re fine,” I whispered back. “Did you find out anything? What’s he doing?”
“I’m not sure, but he’s sure working at it. Come on, you need to see for yourself.”
Chapter 46
“Everybody be real quiet,” Etta Mae said, pulling up her hood. “He’s not far, so let’s go slow and easy.”
She hunched her shoulders and slithered through the undergrowth with me, holding Latisha’s hand, slithering right behind her. We carefully pushed aside wet branches, trying to see in the gray light filtering through the trees where we put our feet. We moved cautiously toward what I realized was a strange grunting sound. Etta Mae suddenly crouched down and stopped.
I almost tumbled over her back before pulling up short.
“What’s that noise?” I whispered, crouching down next to her. Latisha scrooched up next to me.
“I don’t know,” Etta Mae whispered, “but I think it’s him. Peek through here and see if you can see anything.” She parted a few laurel limbs and I leaned forward to look through the gloom.
It took me a minute to focus on the dark shadow that stood out against the gray sky. There wasn’t much undergrowth to hinder our vision because most of the weeds and bushes around the area had been trampled down into a muddy mess. Rodney—if it was Rodney—was standing on the edge of the ditch we’d once scaled, and because of his dark clothing, he was clearly outlined against the gloomy sky.
Etta Mae peered through the leaves beside me, and we were both speechless as we watched the shadow lean over, grab on to something, then move back and forth with strong jerking motions, each one eliciting a grunt from deep in his chest.
Some ways away a glow of light appeared as a car approached on the road to Delmont. The shadow threw itself on the ground, lying flat until the car had passed. If that wasn’t an indication of a crime of some kind being committed, I didn’t know what was.
Latisha edged in closer. “I wanta see.”
“Sh-h-h,” Etta Mae and I both said. I pulled Latisha down in front of me and let her look through the hole in the leaves.
“What’s he doin’?” Latisha said, trying to whisper but not quite making it.
I put my hand over her mouth, as the shadow stopped and looked around. Then, apparently satisfied that nothing was amiss, he leaned over, grasped something near the ground in both hands, and, to the accompaniment of more grunting, began to-ing and fro-ing again.
Suddenly the shadow collapsed to the ground, or maybe it fell down. Whichever it was, it ended up on its bottom. Breathing heavily enough for us to hear, Rodney—and I was sure it was Rodney by this time—sat for a while catching his breath. Then he held up what looked like a long, heavy cane, stuck it upright, and used it to lever himself to his feet. Then, carrying the cane, he walked away from us toward where I assumed his car was parked.
Etta Mae stiffened beside me. “Let’s get outta here.”
“Wait,” I whispered. “I want to know what he’s doing.”
“I know what he’s doing,” Etta Mae hissed. “Let’s move out of earshot so we can talk.”
I didn’t know how far that would be, but I followed her, helping Latisha along as I went. When we got back near the old homestead, Etta Mae stopped and, without a thought of the wet ground, sat down. After a second of hesitation, I did, too. My back and my knees were so grateful for the rest that I took no thought of the soaking I’d get.
Latisha didn’t either, and the three of us gathered on the pine needles for a conference.
“Okay,” I said, keeping my voice low, “what’s he doing?”
“Pulling up stakes,” Etta Mae said.
That stopped me for a minute. Pulling up stakes meant leaving a place, but if Rodney had come out on a wet evening just to pick up a walking stick and leave, then he was goofier than I’d thought.
Then it hit me. “He pulled up a stake! Etta Mae, he’s moving the stakes!”
“That’s exactly right. We saw him pull one out of the ground.”
“That long thing? I thought a stake was a, well, a stake, a little short thing. What he had was a good two feet or more.”
“Yeah, and you saw what a time he had getting it out of the ground, too. But that’s what a property stake is,” Etta Mae assured me. “They’re iron rods, and only a few inches stick out of the ground. The rest of it is hammered in. Surveyors mean for those things to stay. No telling how long he’s been working to get it out.”
“You think he’s going to put it somewhere else? Or maybe,” I said with a sudden hopeful thought, “he just took it up so the surveyors wouldn’t set their sights on it. They’d have to measure the land in its original state with no previous markers to rely on.”
“If that’s what he’s doing,” Etta Mae said wryly, “he’s got a long night ahead with three more stakes to pull up. But, no, Miss Julia, I don’t think so. I think . . .” She stopped, clamped her hand on my arm, and whispered, “Listen.”
Latisha and I sat up straight and strained to hear what Etta Mae was hearing. Then I did hear it, or felt it, maybe, for it was a dull, rhythmic pounding, sort of like a headache, but not quite.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s Rodney,” Etta Mae said as confidently as if she could see him, “and he’s hammering that stake back in the ground.”
Latisha, her head swiveling from one to the other of us, chimed in. “He jus’ prise it up. Why he hammerin’ it back in now?”
“Because,” Etta Mae said, “he’s hammering it into a different place. And I think he’s doing it down near where his car’s parked. Which is some ten feet or so from the original corner. Miss Julia, how far would he have to put it to gain a tenth of an acre?”
“I have no idea. But I’ll bet he does.” I was smoldering by this time, ready to spring to my feet and crash through thickets, briars, mud puddles, and blackberry patches to have it out with Rodney Pace. Never in my life would I have dreamed that a lawn cemetery was important enough to warrant lying and stealing—for that’s what he was doing—in order to dig a few graves.
But a calmer head—Etta Mae’s, for one, and mine soon after—counseled caution. “Let’s think about this for a minute,” she said. So we did, and as we did, that dull pounding started up again. I finally figured that Rodney must have put some sort of protective cover over the head of the stake to muffle the sound of metal on metal when the hammer hit it. That made me all the more irate, for it meant that he’d carefully planned every step he had to make in order to steal a tenth of an acre from the railroad and add it to my twenty-nine and nine-tenths.
“See if I’ve figured this right,” Etta Mae said. “If he’s doing what we think he’s doing, then moving one stake’s not going to help him. He’ll have to move the one on the opposite corner, too. That would give him an extra, say, ten feet or so all along the south edge of your property. So, we could walk over to that stake and wait for him. We could just be sitting there when he shows up with all his tools. Maybe tackle him and hold him down, or make a citizen’s arrest or something.”
That’s when Etta Mae’s calmer head went south on her. If we were going to do that, we might as well do it here and now.
“No,” I said, shaking my head, “I don’t want to take a chance that he’ll get there before us—we’re tired, which’ll slow us down, and he has his car. And now that he’s moved one stake, he’ll be faster moving the second one. What I want, Etta Mae, is for that other stake marking the southwestern corner of the property to stay where it is, and this one—the one he’s working on now—to be off by however many feet he’s putting it. Proof positive, Etta Mae, of a crime interrupted in midstream.”
“I gotcha,” she said, seeing the wisdom of what I’d said. “That means we gotta do something pretty soon, or he’ll really be pulling up stakes.”
Latisha said, “I b’lieve he done with that hammerin’.”
Etta Mae and I lifted our heads and listened. Those muted thuds had ceased, and I pictured a few inches of an iron stake sticking out of the ground in an entirely new and illegal place. He’d have the orange plastic tie on it, too, just as if the stake had been right where it now was for the past sixty years or so.
How did Rodney think he could explain to his surveyors the discrepancy between the figures on the old plat and the new figures that they would come up with? Claim that their modern equipment was superior to the old? Would they care or would they simply do the job they were hired to do, then move on to the next one?
But the big question was this: how did Rodney expect to get title to the land, even if it had grown in size overnight? I’d told him a million times that I wouldn’t sell it. Thurlow Jones came to mind. If there was some not entirely illegal way to force me to sell, he was the one who could find it. He’d already as much as threatened me with a legal seizure of my property on the grounds of the public good.
I shivered slightly, although the air was so heavy with humidity I could hardly breathe.
Etta Mae and Latisha sat waiting for me to decide what to do. Time ticked by, and Rodney would soon be on his way to the next stake. Then we all perked up, for we were hearing a new sound. It sounded like something scraping and scratching against the ground.
“What’s that?” I whispered.
Etta Mae cocked her head and listened. “Sounds like he’s filling the hole where the stake was. I bet he’ll cover it with brush and stuff—maybe even plant a little bush in it so nobody will suspect a thing.”
“Etta Mae,” I said, taking a firm grip on my nerve, “we’ve got to do something to run him off, and I don’t mean run him off to the other stake. I mean run him off completely. What if we dash out of the bushes, screaming and yelling, and see if we can scare him off?”
Latisha whispered, “I bet I can scare him.”
I looked at Etta Mae. “Or do you think I ought to just walk up to him and threaten him with the law? I’d love to tell him he can dig up all the stakes he wants to but he’ll never dig a grave on this place.”
Latisha whispered, “I know how to scare him, Miss Lady.”
I patted Latisha’s shoulder, told her to wait a minute, and looked to Etta Mae for an answer.
“Miss Julia,” Etta Mae whispered, “you’re a brave woman, but he’s got a shovel in his hands and we’ve got Latisha with us. I don’t think walking up and threatening him will work. It might make him mad, and we don’t know what he’d do.”
“I can’t just sit here and do nothing,” I said, going over the possibilities in my mind, “but I can’t put Latisha in danger, either.” Fully aware of Rodney’s determination to have what he wanted, I was hesitant, even slightly afraid, to confront him so far from public view and first responders.
“Miss Lady,” Latisha said, tugging on my sleeve to get my attention. “I know how to scare him. My play pretties’ll scare him so bad, he’ll run right outta his britches.”
“Latisha, honey,” I said, “we don’t have time for play pretties. We have to think.”
“Well,” she said, “think about this.” And she unwrapped the drawstring from her wrist, spread open the top of the sack, reached in, and pulled out a handful of firecrackers.
“Look at that!” Etta Mae rasped out. “Latisha, where’d you get firecrackers?”
“I got my ways,” she said complacently
. “But that ain’t all I got.” She pulled out a long item on a stick and held it up. “I bet this’ll fix him good.”
“Oh, my word!” Etta Mae whispered in awe. “Miss Julia, she’s got a rocket!”
Chapter 47
“Yeah,” Latisha said, eyes gleaming. “Le’s shoot it an’ see what happens.”
“I tell you,” Etta Mae said, running her hand over the rocket, “this thing will do the trick, all right. Miss Julia, you have a match?”
“I don’t smoke, Etta Mae.”
She started giggling, then grew quiet. “This is ridiculous. Here we have what we need to scare the you-know-what outta Rodney, and neither of us has a light.”
“Look in my sack,” Latisha said. “I gotta a Bic down in there somewhere.”
“What!” Etta Mae grabbed the yellow sack, rummaged around in it, pulling out handsful of firecrackers and, finally, a Bic lighter. “My land, Latisha, you come prepared, don’t you?”
“I’m gonna be a Boy Scout one a these days.”
“Honey,” Etta Mae said, “you’re already an Eagle Scout in my book. Miss Julia, what do you think? We could edge in a little closer and set off a few firecrackers and see what happens. If they don’t work, we can light him up with the rocket.”
“That’d be dangerous, wouldn’t it?” I didn’t want to damage anything but Rodney’s arrogance.
“It’s too wet,” Etta Mae said, separating the bundles of firecrackers into separate strings. “We won’t start a forest fire.”
“I wasn’t . . .” I started, then said, “I don’t want to really hurt him, Etta Mae.”
She glanced up from her squat. “I know, and I’m just aiming to scare him. Of course, we’re not responsible for anything that happens afterward.” She giggled. “He may have to change his shorts.”