by Jack Riggs
“Let's stop here for a moment,” he says. “This is such a pretty view, don't you think?”
“I don't even know how far Momma's land extends,” I say. “I don't think I‘ve ever walked the whole parcel.”
“Your father and I discussed his desire to own the land to the base of Whiteside, but this is about the extent of it, right here.”
“It's smaller than Momma thought,” I say, surprised, though John Boyd remains silent beside me. It's as if he's letting his words sink in and become truth before he continues.
Through the stillness comes the sound of earthmovers working the land. It fills the hollow air and makes me think the cove is being torn apart. “God, are they tearing up everything at once?”
“No,” John Boyd says, “they're still down by 107, but they want to come up here, that's for sure. They want to make this whole cove a golf course and residential area. Arnold Palmer's designed it. The ninth green would be right back down yonder.” He points, his finger settling right on top of Momma's house.
I look at him when he does this, surprised that John Boyd would know such specifics of something he has promised will never happen. “Arnold Palmer,” I say. “They've already designed the golf course, already taken into consideration all of this?”
“Sure,” he says. “They've designed the whole resort area. Not just this parcel, but many different ones around Cashiers and over near Glenville. They can get hold of maps and make designs. Anybody can do that.”
“And you've seen them, the maps and designs?” I ask.
“I have,” he says. “They keep me abreast of what's happening. I met Arnold himself when he came up here to do a flyover.”
For the first time, I realize that in the length of our walk, John Boyd has yet to look at me. “And what are these developers telling you?” I ask. “What are they saying?”
“Well, one thing is that they're getting close, Cassie. They want the land.”
“Want our land?”
“Yes, this land, all of it from Whiteside to 107.”
“Can we fight them?”
“Probably not,” he says, the words so matter- of- fact that they make me wince. “I'm trying to make some deals, trying to keep your mother in a good place when this happens.”
“When it happens?” I say, “How can that be? It's her property. She'd have to agree to sell it, wouldn't she?”
John Boyd turns and walks until he is at the edge of the woods, my father's old refuge somewhere near where the earth and mountain meet. He sits down on a rock that is protruding from the ground. “Look, Cassie, come here, sit down, please.” His hand moves in front of him like he is swatting flies, a motion meant for me to follow, but I remain a good distance away.
My distrust of John Boyd resurfaces hard and fast. I have carried it with me for years after finding out about his part in having me sent away. Kelly had already been born when Momma wrote about John Boyd's involvement. She was trying to be the peacemaker and heal the wounds between my father and me. She said John Boyd made him choose, me and my baby or the church. It hadn't been a blunt order, Momma wrote, something direct and out in the open, but more a threat implicitly made when he told my father that there would not be an illegitimate child born into Whiteside Cove Baptist. “It was better to send you away,” she tried to explain. “It might be hard for you to understand this now, but your father made the right choice.”
I was so angry at the time that I couldn't understand what she was saying, couldn't see my father was, in his own way, going against John Boyd's orders that I experience the same fate as any other girl who became pregnant in the congregation. I wrote her back in anger, one line: “This wasn't my choice.” The response, I'm sure, hurt my father greatly, if he ever saw the letter and read it.
I don't know what he thought about me in the end. If he were alive today I would talk to him, tell him about his granddaughter, say, I still love you, no matter how much hurt we caused each other. I would not let what happened all those years ago stand in the way of our reconciliation. If he were alive, we would talk and make amends. But my father is dead and I'm here with John Boyd, the man who found him along the base of Whiteside, talking about what is to become of Momma and our land. His impatience makes me uneasy, my refusal to come, do as I'm told and sit with him, unacceptable. But I won't do it. I stay put, tell him that I'm fine where I am.
“Just tell me what we need to do,” I say. “It's getting late, Momma will worry.”
It's then that he tells me—the land is not really hers. It has always belonged to the church, the agreement between the deacons and my father never made legal in the eyes of the law.
“Parker knew our agreement,” he says. “He knew we would take care of Mavis as long as we could. But when the church closed its doors, well, it sort of changed.”
“I don't understand,” I say. “I thought there was an agreement, written and signed, that deeded the land to her. I thought it was all taken care of before Daddy died.”
“No, there was never a paper, Cassie.” John Boyd shakes his head, clicks his tongue like he's scolding me for such a suggestion. “Your father knew that at the time. Parker agreed with the way we handled it. Who would have thought the church would close its doors? No, I wish there would have been a contract or something, I really do. It would make all of this much easier.”
“How has all this been handled over the years?” I ask. “Who's been in charge of all this property?”
“Well, I was the last deacon,” he says. “It's been up to me over the years. When we sold the church property down on 107, I took that money and set it aside for Mavis because we weren't tax exempt anymore. It's all gone up over the years, Cassie. It's costing an arm and a leg to keep her there. The money I was using to pay the property tax, repair the house, things like that, is about gone. We're going to have to do something. I'm trying to work out a deal that she'll get one of the condos to live in, sort of part of the trade—you know, to let her still believe that this is her land. But I need you to talk to her. I don't want her to be upset when it all has to be done.”
“When is that?” I ask.
“What?”
“When do they want her out?”
“I'm not sure, maybe August.”
“August, my god, that's like six weeks or something.” I count it out on my fingers just to make sure I'm right.
“It could be longer, Cassie. I just don't know.”
“But there was a contract, something written down that might help,” I say.
“I'm sorry, Cassie. There's nothing. I would have told her myself some time ago, but then the way she is with me sometimes, well, I just didn't want to risk her shutting me out. I promised your father I would look after her, if anything happened to him. I've tried, Cassie. But now I need you to tell Mavis what's going on. She needs to know.”
“I don't know if I can do this,” I say.
John Boyd pushes himself up, hands pressing against thighs, the exertion of this long walk hard on him. “Cassie, there's been some hard times up here, bad blood between us, I know that. I want to do what's right, and what's right is to get her to understand the situation so we can all move forward.” He puts an arm on my shoulder, looks at me for the first time. “You're really the only one who can talk to her.”
What John Boyd has just told me about the land makes me sick to my stomach. And if I had any nerve at all, I would slap his hand right off my shoulder. I don't know what to believe about any of it, but I know John Boyd is not to be trusted. I smile, but promise nothing, tell him that there's a lot to think about and that we need to start back.
It bothers me, his insistence that there are no papers or a deed. It was not in my father's character to leave loose ends. He ran his church from top to bottom. He was in on every major decision concerning its upkeep, knew by name his entire congregation, who was tithing and who gave in other ways, canned vegetables and smoked meat, a new roof on the parsonage, painting the church—good works
done when money was not an option. My father worked tirelessly, and I can't imagine that he would have let John Boyd just shake his hand over something as important as land.
When we reach the back fence, John Boyd peels off from our walk and heads toward his car. Momma is on the front porch watching, one hand holding on to the rail, the other pulling a sweater closed across her dress. I join her on the steps. “I'll be in touch then,” he says, climbing into the front seat, a smile faint on his face like he's not so sure he has made his point with me.
I wave. “That'll be fine,” I say.
When I watch him drive away, I feel I have been talking to the enemy. I think about how he never really looked me in the eyes, always glanced downward or out over the land like he was sizing it up, imagining what the cove would look like after it was carved up and divvied out to those who would be able to afford to live where Arnold Palmer might play a round of golf. Then a question enters my mind. “Momma, where did Daddy keep all his papers? You know, business papers and such?”
“Lord honey, I don't know,” she says. “Some of it was at the church, and some of it was kept here at the house.”
“What about the deed to your land? Where did he keep that?”
This stops her for a moment. It is as if she realizes for the first time that there are things lost to her, memories and events in her life that have left her for good, or else are buried so deep that they require more than she has left to dig them up. “I don't know,” she says. “Your father and John Boyd took care of all of that.”
“But Daddy had something, right? He signed a paper, a contract or a deed or something?”
I can tell the questions frustrate her, the details about things that happened ten years ago, details my father kept to himself because he never wanted her to worry over them, but now she has to. “He would have shown it to you,” I remind her, “you might have even signed it.”
And then the confusion clears, memory of what I am asking for returns. “Yes he did,” she says, her eyes brightening. “I remember. He brought the paper home. We sat at the kitchen table and looked at it. He felt after all the years he had sacrificed for his congregation, that he had finally done something for me, something that was really just for me. He was proud.”
I smile, touch her face. “Well, we need to find that paper,” I say. “We need to find it very soon.”
“John Boyd will know where it is,” she says. Her words have a sense of finality that this man will somehow come to her rescue.
“John Boyd wants us to look here first,” I lie. I cannot tell her that she doesn't own this land. I cannot because I believe she does, and that John Boyd is lying.
Peck once told me that the eyes are a window into the soul. When someone won't look at you straight on, they must be missing something inside or withholding something that they don't want you to see. He told me this after his suspicions about Clay began. After he failed to come in on time for one of his shifts last year, Clay avoided eye contact with Peck, and he knew something had changed. Peck said it was strange, but at the time I knew why Clay had been late on call. He was with me that afternoon for the very first time. It was the beginning, the first step that has brought me this great distance, standing here with Momma on her front porch and pregnant again. But John Boyd won't run me off this time. I'm here to stay.
Peck was right about a man's soul. John Boyd is hiding something. The man is up to no good.
Peck
BACK LAST WINTER, Surfside sent us all to Bennettsville to watch a demonstration on the dangers of mobile- home fires. The chief over there loaded us all into a school bus and took us out into an empty cotton field near Clio where they had put up a trailer. They made it look real, with toys outside and a car parked in front. J.D. thought it was somebody's home, but I said they just wanted us to take it seriously by making it look as real as possible.
They circled us around the trailer a good distance away, told us to wear our masks and turnouts because of the smoke and heat, and then someone went inside and lit a small flame on a couch like a cigarette had been left to smolder. They had two pumpers nearby, had built and filled a pool for drafting just in case something got out of hand. Over by the bus, they pulled out this big old clock that someone said came from the Bennettsville YMCA pool, a lap clock is what they called it, and turned it on when the fireman inside said, “The candle's lit.”
We all stood out there in the cold wind and watched that clock to see just how long it took the trailer to go up. I noticed J.D. taking notes, watching and scribbling whenever the chief announced what was happening inside the trailer at each moment during the fire. In a couple of minutes, the couch was completely involved, black poisonous smoke pouring out the windows and doors. Flames danced at the windows and licked along the bottom of the door. At the twelve- minute mark, there was a sudden explosion that caught us all off guard, blowing out windows as the fire found more oxygen. The whole thing took off like it was made out of dry kindling.
The trailer itself began to glow red hot, every window full of flame. The siding and lower frame radiated a great heat we could feel even though we were a safe distance away. At about the twenty- minute mark, the whole goddamn thing just exploded. Some of the men whistled, some walked backward, some just said “god almighty” and pulled their masks on, especially those who were downwind. In thirty minutes, the trailer was gone, the car that sat outside the door gutted. The windows in the vehicle had been left down, something I do all the time when I drive up to my house, and when the radiated heat got hot enough, the interior ignited like someone had poured fuel on the seats.
When the point had been made, the chief sent his firemen in on the burn. They got the pumpers up close and hit the fire hard. It wasn't an easy one to put out because of all the plastic and siding material. Trailer construction is largely unregulated, so there's no thought put into fire safety. No thought on how the trailer is built without proper egress. There's only one door, and if the fire starts between you and that escape route, you have nowhere to go; your chances of being killed increase tenfold.
On the way back, we stopped at a Piggly Wiggly for some beer, the smell of burning plastic clinging to our clothes and skin. The young checkout girl saw my insignias and smiled when she rang up the brew. “Ya'll been working hard today,” she said.
I watched her bag the beer, gave her a ten- dollar bill to pay for it all. The boys deserved that much. “Not as hard as you, darlin’,” I told her. She smiled and I could see she was probably Kelly's age, maybe a year older. It was in the middle of the school year, in the middle part of the afternoon when this girl should have been in school, not working behind a cash register checking out firemen who are buying beer in a Piggly Wiggly. It made me want to make sure Kelly has choices. That no matter what happens between me and her mother, she will have a good life ahead of her. I smiled when she handed me my change, grabbed the bag of beer, and got the hell out of there. We drove back talking about trailer fires, hoping to never have to fight one more than twenty minutes away because after that, you might as well roast marshmallows. You're not saving anything.
That's what we learned on a cold day last year when we stood there in that field outside Clio. It's something we're all remembering right now as J.D. fights traffic to get us out to McDowell Road. It's the day after the birthday party and nobody's feeling like fighting a fire. Lori and I got into the station late, everybody there clicking tongues and shaking their heads when we walked in. Roddy said, “Anything we need to know here, Chief?” Everybody laughed at that, and I told Roddy to shut up.
J.D. was up on the Pirsch. He looked down at us both, said to Lori, “When I said take care of him, I didn't mean take him home with you.” They all laughed again and then I told J.D., “She didn't take me home with her, I took her home with me.” That got enough woofs and howls to be heard all the way down to the strand. Lori looked at me like you got to be kidding and then just walked off into her office and started working.
&n
bsp; We all thought we were going to get a pass today, that the fire gods would let us be to heal our self- inflicted wounds and get over the party. But that didn't happen. The bell rang at eleven- thirty got us real good, and now here we are driving out to the edge of the county.
The boys are betting good money that we're on our way to put out a trailer fire. Mobile homes are strung out along the way. Most are old and run-down, and the county has yet to pave the sandy roads or set a water line for hydrants this far out. In front of us, I can see black smoke behind a grove of trees climbing into the sky fast. Whatever it is, it's alive and well, and we'll be the ones, hung -over or not, who'll have to go in there and kill it.
Where we turn off, the road is hard sand. When we get nearer the fire, the ground turns to mush. The Pirsch has difficulty maneuvering down into the small dead end where a trailer sits fully involved. There's a dog out in front of the fire barking like it knows the flames aren't supposed to be inside. It looks like Clio last winter, but this one's real and getting worse by the second. There are people standing around watching, staring at us as we struggle with the sand just to get to the fire ball sitting in front of us. Finally J.D. says, “Fuck it. We'll pull from here. It's not like we got a fire hydrant waiting.”
I radio back to Lori that we're 10- 23. J.D. and Partee start pulling lines while I go over to see if anyone can tell me who's living in the trailer. A boy straddling a homemade minibike, barefoot and shirtless, points to a young woman sitting under a palmetto with her head in her hands. She's trembling, a cigarette dangling from her fingers. “Is that your trailer, ma'am?” I ask, kneeling down, my hand touching her shoulder.
“I think so,” she says, talking to the ground. She doesn't lift her head to look at me. “I think it's mine.”