I swayed. “How did you find out?”
“Because we’re listening in on Monzell. As much as we can. His security is pretty good.”
Cowboy mimed jacking a rifle and pointing it eastward. “Probably got it from the Russians. Fucking Russians are everywhere now.”
I took a deep breath. “Monzell could be spying on everyone we know.”
“Yep.”
“But what good do my pictures do him? They’re not that racy.”
“You shoulda shown more skin,” Sink said. Cowboy nodded.
Gutsy hit them with a wicked side-eye. “We think he’s using them to keep Kern in line. All he has to do is have somebody send them to Amber and tell her they came from her husband. She’s already hearing rumors about Kern horndogging you.”
“I am sorry . . . I’m so sorry to have caused this trouble . . . Sorry. Really sorry.”
“Say you’re sorry one more time, and I’ll smack ya. Own your shit. Get mad. Get fucking furious. Stop lying to yourself, Yarny. You want revenge. You want to fuck up everyone who fucked you over. Stupid whiny weak bitch.”
She shoved me.
Brim lunged, and I spent the next moments being dragged around. I clutched her head.
Finally, we all sagged to a halt, me hanging onto her neck while Gutsy, Sink, and Cowboy grinned. “Damn, that was fun,” Sink said. “That mule is sick righteous.”
“One of us,” Cowboy said.
I dragged myself up on the saddle. Brim dipped her head and sneered at the others. “Is there anything else I need to know?”
Gutsy planted herself in front of us. “We’re just getting to the good part. The Jefferson County Guardians of God are expanding. Fucking Goggers. They’re playing army.”
“I’ve heard. We’re fighting back. Petitions, email campaigns, calling our elected officials . . . ”
“Petitions,” Sink said dryly. He shrugged his shoulders. The assault rifle swayed.
“And calling pols who ain’t gonna do shit,” Cowboy added. “Because they’re all in the pockets of people like Monzell.” He hawked a stream of tobacco on the ground. “Ohhh, Imma call my senator, soon as he gets done kissing ass in Washington.”
Gutsy gave them a zip-it gesture. Her eyes grim, she dodged Brim’s teeth to crowd in closer and tuck a thumb drive into the top of my hiking boot. “Monzell has set up an enemies’ list for the Goggers to harass. You and your pals who run the farm are at the top of it.”
I’M NOT TELLING Gus about Monzell hacking my photos. I’m burying this so deep he can’t sense it. Right beside the compartment with the rapes.
Alberta paced in front of five deer heads mounted above the big fireplace in the main house, a hundred-year-old farmstead cobbled into a much bigger home via added rooms and porches, a covered walkway to one of the dorm buildings, another walkway to a five-vehicle garage, and graveled paths in every direction, all hooded by large trees. The décor was a mix of her hunter-casual and Macy’s goddess-worship-therapist style. A giant goddess statue stood in one corner, trickling water into a small pool.
A dozen dogs and cats were curled up on the rugs around it. The goddess had muddy paw prints on her stone feet.
“Well, we’re in damn good company on Monzell’s enemies’ list,” Alberta said. “You, us, Tal and Doug, Gabby and Jay, Delta and Pike, Santa Joe and his weed empire, half the ministers in the county, two ex-mayors, the president of the Jefferson County Farmers’ Co-Op, the head librarian in Turtleville, and Barry at the dry cleaners. He’s the only one I can’t figure out.”
Macy, seated on a couch covered in one of my knitted throws, said quietly, “Barry headed the committee that accused Monzell’s Daw Ridge plant of sneaking their filthy run-off water into the river—again.” She sighed and sipped a mug of dandelion tea. “That’s why he wasn’t re-elected to the city council.” She glanced at me. “Kern campaigned for his opponent. Kern has a lot of followers.”
In the fireplace, logs crackled and smoked. Deer heads looked down at me, barely blinking. Ethereal vapor curled from their stiff nostrils. I saw them in the pastures, mingling with our flock of sheep, grazing on the bosoms of the green slopes. Waiting for the inevitable doom.
“Earth to Lucy,” Alberta grunted.
I settled deeper into a couch filled with dogs and cats, a pet squirrel and a raccoon. “Sheriff Whittlespoon isn’t well. That’s why he hasn’t fired Kern and run him out of the county. That’s why Delta is keeping quiet about Kern. She’s worried about Pike. If Pike retires . . . Pike’s the only major official standing between us and the new regime. He’s trying to give Kern the chance to fill his shoes. To do the right thing.”
Blood, the deer heads said.
I blinked. What did ‘blood’ mean? The dead deer heads didn’t blink back, this time. Their ghostly breaths vanished.
Macy’s phone beeped. She pulled it from the pocket of her pink overalls.
Her face went pale. “Carolina Furniture has cancelled our order for more bunk beds. They say they can’t get them in stock.”
Alberta slung a beer into the fireplace. “That’s bullshit. We’ve bought furniture from them for ten years . . . ”
Macy’s phone beeped again.
Her hand faltered, spilling dandelion tea on the screen. “Cray Payton can’t repair the fence in the south pasture. His wife is sick, and he’s taking care of her full time.”
“He’s not married,” Alberta said. “Unless he calls his pig herd a harem.”
Macy’s phone beeped ten times in the next ten minutes.
We were on Monzell’s enemies’ list.
And we were being shunned.
THERE’S SOMETHING I need to say about Alberta and Macy.
I loved them like sisters, the way I loved Gus’s sisters—Tal and Gabby—and Cathy Deen, and Delta.
For a while, not long after moving to the farm, I wanted to become a lesbian because of them. As if I could convert, like changing churches. Get sprinkled instead of dunked. They were such a strong couple, so connected, so solid. Nothing rattled their bond.
That Macy is a sweet little darlin’, and some lucky yahoo will take her out of this girl hotel before long.
Said by at least one man on the sheep-shearing crews that passed through every spring.
I’m going to introduce Macy to my cousin next time he’s here from Birmingham. He loves outdoorsy little blondes.
To which Alberta had replied, “Eee-yep. I can understand why.”
And I thought, A girlfriend would be safe. No violence. No stabbing me with penises. Just kisses and backrubs and touching and all that. In return, I could count on her devotion, and I could stop hating and fearing the male sex while harboring hopes of loving a man.
One autumn, a tall woman in manure-spattered overalls finished delivering several new heifers for the farm’s dairy herd. She flirted with Alberta then grilled me about Alberta’s availability.
“Damn, she’s hell on wheels with a side order of take-no-prisoners. She’s my kind of woman. You know what I mean? Would she be interested?”
Macy was off to one side, entering figures into the farm’s big checkbook.
I cleared my throat. “I’m sure she would, if she were free, but she’s spoken for.”
“At least tell me this much. She’s not straight, is she?”
Simple question, or it should have been. Three women, standing outside a barn in the mountains on a late autumn afternoon. Our only witnesses—a penned group of female animals, bred to serve without complaint.
Macy struggled to keep quiet, looking tormented. She hated secrecy, but in the current social and political climate it wasn’t safe to be lesbians running a shelter for straight women scared of straight men.
I stepped up. “Alberta’s spoken for.”
The heifer woman stared at me. Her mouth flattened. She looked from me to Macy, whose eyes turned into big blue moo-cow rounds of suppressed laughter.
“You?” the woman said, pointing at me. “You? You’re a runt.”
“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m not a runt. I’m just small compared to you.”
8
I SURVIVED EIGHTEEN years in the Army and multiple tours in combat zones thanks to my kitchen charms. My company has the best send-em-home-in-one-piece record in the battalion. All because I have this secret ability to sense what makes people dangerous—hungry.
So there I was, stirring sliced sweet potatoes in a pot of oil over a campfire. Furthering world peace through the diplomacy of fried southern taters.
Sanchez stood beside me, translating everything I said to the women and children. She wears a big fluttery head scarf tied around her helmet. Looks like a pirate. She can make eye contact with the women, but I’m not allowed. So I look at the kids. The armed men—husbands, brothers, uncles, sons—lounged around the perimeter—and oh, yeah, they’ll let me know I cross a line.
I forked up a slice of fried potato.
“This is called a sweet potato stick,” I told the kids. Explaining the name, “French fry,” was too much for my storytelling ability and Sanchez’s Pashto vocabulary. “But it’s not sweet, and it’s not a stick.”
Sanchez gave me the Stink Eye. Whatever she told them, they laughed anyway.
“Sweet potato sticks are the most important food in my province of America,” I went on, wagging the tater like a long, orange finger. “The home of James Brown and Elvis.”
Blank stares.
“Coke a Cola.”
That got smiles and nods.
I cooled all the fries on a rock, telling stories the whole time. They giggled like crazy. My people and our strange ways. Eating slimy okra pods and alligators’ tails and giant fish with whiskers, and these peanuts we pulled out of the ground. As the fries cooled I started to hand them out to the girls first, but Sanchez shook her head. So I spread my hands and said, “Here’s what we say when it’s time to eat,” I told the kids. “Come and get it, y’all!”
Sanchez translated like a drama queen. Reared back on her boot heels and almost yodeled the words.
They looked startled, then burst out laughing. The women smiled behind their covered mouths, and even some of the men grinned.
A woman nudged one boy forward. Shaggy hair, wide eyes; not more than ten. He stepped out of the group and stopped before the fries. “Bazir,” he said, pointing to himself. “Thank you, y’all.”
While the children and their mothers ate I sat down on a camp stool and perched a stack of small posters on my knee. I pointed to a map of the United States.
“My friend, Luce, drew these pictures for me to show you,” I called out. Sanchez gave me a hard look. “Don’t you mean your wife, Captain?”
Bingo. Men don’t have female friends who aren’t sisters or cousins. Not in the view of these villagers. So, what could I say? “Yes, wife.”
I laid the U.S. map aside and pointed to the next poster, a large drawing of western North Carolina. “This is my home. My sisters and I grew up right here. I pointed to a large star. This is called Asheville. People who live in Asheville are a different tribe from other North Carolinians.”
Sanchez translated.
“Sweet taters,” Bazir said.
I nodded. “Sweet taters.”
I held up a large photo of Tal and Gabby. “These are my sisters. They are very tall, like me. They have long red hair, but instead of hands they have cooking pots and spoons. They can’t clap their hands. They rattle too much.”
Sanchez translated dramatically.
The kids were onto my bullshit now. They laughed. The women leaned closer, squinting at the photo. My sisters, posing in the renovated Victorian kitchen at Tal and Doug’s house at Free Wheeler, wore jeans, sweaters and full-length white aprons.
“They work as chefs. Cooks.”
One of the women whispered to her husband, who spoke to Sanchez. “She says don’t they have husbands and children?”
No way would I attempt to explain that my sisters were living with their intended husbands. So I said, “I keep giving them away, but the men give them back. Because they rattle.”
Sanchez translated. For a tense moment I psychically smelled burning olive oil. Then the men burst out laughing, and everyone joined in.
But now my sisters have come back to our home. I pointed to North Carolina.
But all I said was, “They want to cook for people the way our family did, before. Our parents owned a restaurant.” I held up another sweet potato fry, without much enthusiasm. But when Riley translated, everyone seemed impressed.
Another woman asked a question. Riley squinted at me. “She says, ‘How can your sisters live there without a man from their family to be in charge of it? So you will go home soon to take charge of them?’”
“I have new husbands in mind for them,” I said. “Ones who like women who rattle and cook.”
I held up a picture of you, Luce.
“This is my wife,” I announced. “This is Lucy.”
They stared at your hair. It’s so pale it’s almost white in the photo. They traded a lot of shocked looks, and there was a lot of pointing.
Sanchez said, “They want to know if she’s Muslim. Because of all the scarves and the long skirt.”
“Tell them she’s Christian but it’s a very modest sect.”
Finally the leader of the women spoke directly to Riley.
“Captain, they’d like to honor her with an Afghan name. Tabana. It translates roughly to ‘The light of the moon.’ Because of her hair.”
“Tell them it’s a beautiful name, and I’m sure she’ll love it. And thank them.”
Bazir walked up tapped me on the arm. “Sweet tater,” he said happily.
“Sweet tater,” I answered. He grinned.
I HALTED JUST outside the security light of the barn and sat down, looking up at the January half-moon in a sky of scudding clouds.
Some said we have energy vortexes in our mountains, that they draw “Sensors” to them—people who are sensitive to those vibrations. That the energy is calming, and healing. The Cove—the heart of Jefferson County—is thought to be the most powerful pulse at their center. My dad said such effects were the work of the Holy Spirit. He made me promise not to reveal his blasphemy to his Methodist congregation.
I curled deeper inside my shawls and quilt, watching my breath puff white through their soft igloo entrance they made around my face. The cold night air wisped at my nose.
My phone rang. I hugged it. “Hello, Captain.”
“I married you today.” Gus’s deep voice filled the small theater of fabric. “It was for community relations.”
“I . . . you . . . what?”
He told me the story.
“So, Luce, for the sake of foreign relations and maybe even the future of world peace, do you mind being married to me in the eyes of a small village in Kandahar Province?”
I smiled. “For the sake of world peace, I agree to be your Afghan wife by proxy. ‘Light of the Moon’ MacBride.”
“Considering the MacBride history as bootleggers, how about I call you Moonshine? Ready for our honeymoon, Moonshine?”
I went very quiet.
He said quickly, “Take your time, Luce. When you’re ready, you’ll tell me what scares you.”
I rustled around, holding back tears until my face ached. I tapped keys on my phone. Searched for files. “I’m emailing you something. One of our residents asked me if I’d help her work on a knitting pattern she found. You know, I teach the residents to knit and crochet and spin. It’s so meditative and calming . . . well, and so . . . Macy
encourages the women to explore their sexuality as part of her counseling program . . . solo . . . to claim their personal space, and power . . . it’s important for women who have developed the abused mindset to value their own bodies, and . . . ”
“Moonshine,” Gus said gruffly, “if you’re trying to talk dirty to me, just go ahead. I really want to hear about that pattern. In detail.”
“Okay. It’s a corset. With a matching garter belt.”
His psychic reaction was stark and hard and sweet.
ALBERTA SNORTED. “One of your yarn groupies is here to do her cute little old lady routine on you.”
I headed down a hall at the main house. A long, blue-sky rug softened the floor. My work. I liked the feel of my foundation under my nervous feet.
I knocked.
Feet rushed. The door swung open. “I want the hug,” a small gray woman in camo coveralls yelled. “Lucy!” She grabbed my hand and pulled me into the room’s friendly swarm of old couches and lamps and bookcases. One leg winged out from a deformed knee joint. She paddled on hiking shoes crusted with dried mud. A tangle of brown-gray hair fluffed around a thin face canyoned with shallow jowls. A pack of long, thin, fashion cigarettes protruded from the breast pocket of the coveralls.
My instinctive hug mechanism reacted to the misery in her face. Her cushioned arms grabbed me like crab claws as I enfolded her, cradling head and shoulders, waist and back. Then I topped it off with The Sunday Share. What Dad called his hand-over-hand blessing, offered to every member of his flock as each left the sanctuary after his 8:30 and 11 a.m. sermons.
A double-link freight-car-puller for the soul, Lucille. Grasp with the right hand, cover with the left hand.
“I don’t care what they say about you,” Mirelda said, her leathery hands cozied inside mine. “You don’t scare me.”
“Good.”
“I’ve come to ask you a big ol’ favor. I know I shouldn’t come here and beg you, but can you take in my friend’s granddaughter? She’s only a baby, just eighteen, and her mother’s run off and my friend is on those vouchers now, the ones the government gives out instead of Social Security. She can’t afford to raise the girl.”
The Kitchen Charmer Page 12