Uncommon Clay (A Deborah Knott Mystery Book 8)

by Margaret Maron

  “You ever do any turning?” Amos asked.

  “Not really. My mother used to have a wheel and she’d let me mess with it once in a while.”

  “You want to learn?”

  “You saying you’d teach me?” The boy tried to sound casual, but Amos sensed an eagerness beneath his words.

  “How old are you?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “When can you start?”

  “Friday?”

  “Bring your things with you. You can sleep in Donny’s old place.”

  “Granddaddy!” Till then, Libbet had tried to keep quiet, but this was too much. “What about Tom?”

  “Tom already knows how to turn,” the old man said mildly.

  “But he’s ready to take hold and come work here.”

  “Ain’t no reason he can’t still come work here after school. Help teach Davis. Hell, you’n come, too, if you want. We got an order I’m not going to meet if I don’t get more help than June and Bobby can give me. Half the stuff got smashed when James Lucas—when—”

  He couldn’t finish, and the girl laid her head on his shoulder and patted his stroke-drawn hand. “Don’t worry, Granddaddy. We’ll help you catch up. Mom’s already said we would. You don’t need any outsiders coming in.”

  For just an instant, Amos was tempted, but then he thought of what he’d be risking if he was right about Donny and he pulled himself straighter.

  “Davis here ain’t no outsider,” he declared. “He’s Donny’s boy and that makes him just as much my grandson as Tom, and don’t you forget it, missy!”

  Libbet drew back as if he’d slapped her. She and Tom were often at odds, but he was still her brother and it looked as if Granddaddy was getting ready to set this— this bastard in his place. When Tom had been promised.

  The boy stood up. “Friday, then. With my stuff.”

  The door at the other end of the porch opened and his daughter called down their way, “Dad? Can I get you anything?”

  “Yeah, Betty, I reckon you can.” He tried to make his voice sound cheerful. “You can get yourself down here and meet your nephew.”

  “Nephew?” Betty Hitchcock faltered, peering nearsightedly through the darkness. As she came closer, she saw him standing there and caught her breath.

  “You’re Donny’s son?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She shook her head at his likeness to her younger brother. “Why didn’t you tell me he was coming, Dad?”

  “Didn’t rightly know it myself,” Amos said dryly.

  He’d never understand women. Here was Libbet acting like he was taking a snake to his bosom, and there was her mother hurrying past Bobby, who was back on the steps again, to shake the boy’s hand, then give him a hug like he was her long-lost son.

  “I’ve always felt so bad that we couldn’t come find you after Donny died. But we didn’t know your name or where you lived except Raleigh. I guess he felt like he ought not to say anything till . . .” She hesitated.

  “Till he knew for sure I was his?” Davis asked.

  “Till he found out if you wanted to know us,” she said. “You’re not going to run off so quick, are you?”

  “He’s coming back Friday,” Libbet told her.

  “Really? Oh, that will be so much better. Give us a chance to get to know you without so many people around. Can you stay for supper?”

  Before Davis could answer, Libbet said, “Even better, Mom. Guess what? Granddaddy’s going to teach him how to pot. He’s going to live in Uncle Donny’s place.”

  Betty finally became aware of the tension that thrummed the cool night air. “Oh?”

  She looked from her daughter to her newly discovered nephew, back to her father. “Dad?”

  “Might as well see if he’s got a knack for it,” said Amos, lighting another cigarette. “You better get moving, boy. You probably got a lot of ground to cover before Friday.”

  “Yessir. Nice meeting you, ma’am. Libbet.” At the edge of the yard, he hesitated. “Sir? What do I call you?”

  That was a question Amos hadn’t expected, but in for a pig, in whole hog. “Your cousins call me Granddaddy. You might as well, too.”

  “Thanks. Well, see you all soon.”

  He threaded his way past all the parked cars and disappeared into the dark parking area out by the shop. A moment later, they saw his car, a scruffy white Toyota that was almost a twin of Tom’s, pull out of the drive and head toward Raleigh.

  “That’s good of you, Dad,” Betty said. “The way you talked after Donny died? But there, now! I knew you’d be glad if you ever met him. You can’t go against your own blood, can you?”

  Amos leaned back in the swing and blew a thin stream of smoke toward the porch ceiling. “You never said a truer word, honey.”

  “And what about Tom’s blood?” his granddaughter asked angrily. “Doesn’t his count anymore?”

  Betty looked puzzled.

  Behind her mother, people were beginning to drift back out to the porch, some with plastic cups of tea, other with their cigarettes already out and lighters in hand. Among them was her father, but Libbet Hitchcock didn’t care. With all the harshness that only a teenager who knows herself in the right can voice, she asked, “What’re you going to do? Make Davis change his name to Nordan when you give him the place?”

  “Don’t you speak to your grandfather in that tone,” said Betty. “And what are you talking about? Everybody knows Tom’s to have Nordan Pottery. Right, Dad?”

  “Ain’t nothing in writing yet,” Amos said mildly.

  CHAPTER

  15

  While Southerners seek and enjoy the boons of progress, they are also reluctant to abandon old ways.

  —Raised in Clay, Nancy Sweezy

  Thursday was my brother Seth’s birthday, so Minnie invited the whole family and a few friends over that night for cake and homemade ice cream.

  Seth is five brothers up from me and I’ve always felt closer to him than to some of the others—probably because he cuts me more slack than they do. He doesn’t spend half his life criticizing me or giving advice or acting like I’m still the baby sister, with emphasis on the baby part.

  This makes birthday and Christmas gifts something of a problem. I always want to give him the moon with a silver string around it, but I can’t get too fancy for Seth or my other ten brothers will get their feelings hurt if the difference between his presents and theirs is too great. Not that most of them would notice, but their wives tend to keep score.

  This year, I got sneaky and enlisted Haywood’s son Stevie, who’s in school over at Carolina. Seth’s a huge Carolina fan and I’d scored a couple of tickets to the last home game of the basketball season from a fellow judge who’s another Carolina alum. Stevie was more than willing to pretend that the tickets came from him and were practically freebies.

  “How the hell’d you do that?” asked Will, who’s three up from me. “I been trying to get tickets all season.”

  Stevie just grinned and murmured about friends in high places.

  Haywood, Robert, Zach, Andrew, and Daddy had chipped in to get Seth a photocopier for his home office. Since Seth does all the bookkeeping for the farm, it struck me as a rather pragmatic (not to mention tax-deductible) gift.

  Will gave him a gift certificate for dinner for two at a steakhouse in Dobbs, and Herman, who’s an electrician, gave him a paddle fan for the porch. (Annie Sue, Herman’s daughter, promised to install it before summer.)

  My official present, reservations at the Carolina Inn for the night of the game with a buffet breakfast next morning, slid right in among the others without sticking out too far, and Stevie gave me a thumbs up as he went out on the porch to help turn the crank on one of the two ice cream churns that Minnie had going.

  In a family this big, it’s impossible to get everyone here at the same time. Adam, Ben, Jack, and Frank live out of state and many of my nieces and nephews are married and off on their own, but that still left a l
ot of enthusiastic voices to sing “Happy Birthday” to Seth when Minnie brought in the cake, aglow with so many candles that Zach asked her if she had a permit from the fire marshal.

  Through it all, Daddy sat beaming. He’s not much for speech-making, but as he’s gotten older, these times are precious to him. “Means a lot to me to see the family sticking together, prospering,” he said, savoring the dish of strawberry ice cream I brought him. “Just wish the others lived closer to home.”

  “I’m working on Adam,” said Karen, who was back East this week to look after her mother. Mrs. Buffkin was recovering from a mastectomy, and her operation had suddenly made Karen realize just how far away she and Adam were from family out there in California. “Frank and Mae came up to see us last month. Janie’s husband is being transferred to New Jersey and you know how crazy they are about those grandchildren. Wouldn’t surprise me a bit to see them come, too.”

  Frank’s my next-to-oldest brother and the one I know the least because he joined the Navy before I was born. He’d been stationed out in San Diego when his children started marrying, so that’s where he and Mae retired. They get back every other year when Jack and Ben come, so they’re certainly not strangers, but Daddy won’t be completely happy till all his chicks are back under his wingspread.

  “I hate to think that my funeral’s the only time y’all will all be together,” he grumbles, so Karen’s words brightened his day.

  I couldn’t help thinking of Amos Nordan, a man who seemed even more patriarchal about his male descendants than Daddy. He’d begun with only two sons and now both were gone.

  For good.

  At least Daddy’s missing sons were all alive.

  The boys had brought their instruments, I had my guitar, Daddy picked up his fiddle, and those who felt like it sang along for over an hour. When we paused to retune, Karen’s eyes were shining. “This is what I’ve missed out there,” she said. “It’s what our boys are missing.”

  With Karen tripping down memory lane, nobody had the heart to tell her that it’s probably too late for her boys. She and Adam may not have gotten above their raising, but their sons have absolutely no interest in the life we live here. Too much money, too many expensive toys, too much private school snobbery, too little sweaty work— these things have made them very uncomfortable the few times they’ve visited Colleton County. As they’ve grown older, they’ve gotten more polite about it when Adam and Karen bring them south, but what roots they have are firmly attached to Silicon Valley’s golden vistas and I see rough roads ahead if she tries to move them back.

  We finished up with the favorite song of Robert’s three-year-old grandson, the one about the preacher chased up a tree by a bear. He can carry a good tune now and he joined in lustily on the chorus:

  Oh, Lord, you delivered Daniel from the lion’s den.

  And, Lord, you delivered Jonah from the whale and then

  Three Hebrew children from the fiery furnace,

  So the Good Book do declare.

  But, Lord, Lord, if you can’t help me,

  For goodness sake, don’t help that bear.

  We broke for coffee around ten and some of the kids who had school the next day left with their parents.

  Word had gone around most of my family about my ghastly experience over in Seagrove, but what with his being out of town last weekend and my holding court down in Makely all week, tonight was the first time I’d seen Dwight Bryant since I got back. It didn’t surprise me, though, when he came over and said, “Getting to where you can’t go anywhere without stumbling over a body. You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I assured him. “And before you say it, yes, I’m minding my own business and not getting involved. If Connor Woodall called you, he must have told you that.”

  “Good. How’s ol’ Woodall holding up these days?”

  “Woodall?” asked Will, who was standing nearby. “Con Woodall? Whatever happened to him?”

  Which meant that I had to go through the whole thing again for Will, Dwight, and Karen, who had also known Connor when they were kids.

  After they’d finished exclaiming over the way the murder happened and my part in discovering the body, Karen was interested to hear that Connor was married to a potter and instantly commissioned me to buy a piece of Fernwood pottery when I went back. “And if you can get Amos Nordan to turn loose a piece of his old cardinal ware, I don’t care what you have to pay for it.”

  I had ridden over to Seth and Minnie’s with Stevie, who’d already left to drive back to Chapel Hill, but since this was her first time out of the house since her mother’s operation, Karen said she’d take me home. She hadn’t seen my new house yet and she was interested in looking at the pottery I’d brought home from Seagrove.

  We hugged the birthday boy goodnight and got more hugs from those still there, then cut across through the rutted back lanes that were a shortcut from Seth’s house to mine. As Karen eased her rented car over the low humps that keep the lanes from washing out, I wondered again if Sandra Kay had been telling the truth when she said she hadn’t driven through the lane past the car kiln at Nordan Pottery. Shortcuts become so automatic in the country that a person doesn’t always consider bumps and holes.

  My face jug didn’t much interest Karen.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but they haven’t been around all that long. They aren’t really part of the true folk tradition, and anyhow, I can’t help thinking that they started out as racist caricatures—those thick lips, bulging eyes, broad noses.”

  She conceded that mine didn’t have any of those elements, that its expression of mild surprise was even charming. “All the same . . .”

  Even planted with red petunias and blue salvia, my new salt-glazed flower pot took her fancy, with its understated sophistication and spare ornamentation. The maker, David Stuempfle, was unfamiliar to her, but she carefully wrote down his name and directions to his pottery. “Maybe I can get over before I go back. If not . . .?”

  “Sure,” I said, laughing. “I’ll get one for you.”

  She laughed, too. “Well, at least it’s not furniture.”

  I’d held court last year over in High Point during their huge semiannual furniture market, and Karen knew that I’d wanted one of everything I saw, even though I was still living at Aunt Zell’s then. I managed to restrain myself from buying anything except a bed.

  Pottery was proving less resistible.

  I offered Karen a glass of wine, but she shook her head regretfully. “It’s been a lovely evening, but I’d better get back. Mother usually settles in for the night about now and I ought to be there to help her.”

  As I walked out to the car with her, stars were blazing overhead and the moon was nearly full. Spring peepers were loud down by the pond and somewhere a couple of dogs were barking back and forth at each other. I was still standing on the porch, watching the red taillights of her car disappear down the long drive that leads to the hardtop, when more headlights came through the lane from Seth’s.

  It was Dwight.

  “You forgot your sweater,” he said, as he got out of the truck. “Minnie thought you might want it.”

  I had to laugh as I took that old blue sweater and tossed it over my shoulders. The night air was cool, but not so cool that I had given its absence a second thought. Besides, I have lots of sweaters, as Minnie is very well aware.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Oh, come on, Dwight! You know what Minnie really thought.”

  “Oh,” he said, and grinned.

  After all, it’s not as if Minnie and Seth have been all that subtle about it since Dwight came back to Colleton County divorced and unattached.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You’d think by now they’d know it’s never going to happen.”

  Until he joined the Army and went away, Dwight was always around while I was growing up, almost like another brother. Marriage, fatherhood, divorce—nothing changed that. Okay, there was that one nanosecond two or thr
ee years ago, a single experimental kiss that embarrassed the hell out of both of us, but all it really did was permanently confirm that there was nothing between us except a deep and solid friendship. He’s handy when I need an escort for any couples-only thing, I’m here if he wants company watching old movies.

  Dwight cocked an eye at the night sky. “You mean you’re not going to be overcome by all this moonlight and hurl yourself into my manly arms?”

  “’Fraid not. Not tonight anyhow.”

  “Well, shucks.” He smiled down at me. “On the other hand, it’s probably just as good you don’t. April’s setting me up with a friend of hers and I couldn’t handle two women at one time. Too out of practice.”

  “Oh, you’d soon remember,” I assured him.

  April is my brother Andrew’s wife, a sixth-grade teacher with a flare for matching fabrics and wallpaper and now, it would appear, unattached deputies.

  “A friend?” I asked. “Anybody I know?”

  “I think her name’s Sylvia something. Teaches at April’s school. Know her?”

  “Sylvia Clayton?”

  “Yeah, that sounds right. What’s she like?”

  “I only met her once,” I said. “She’s not drop-dead gorgeous, but nice-looking, and she seems to have a good sense of humor.”

  In truth, it was her laugh I remembered best, a girlish giggle that seemed to be triggered by almost anything. I wasn’t sure she’d be right for Dwight, but then I was the one who’d been plenty sure Kidd was right for me, and we see where that got me.

  “Karen wasn’t interested in anything to drink,” I told him. “You?”

  “You having one?”

  We decided on bourbon and Pepsi and, since it was such a mild night, we sat on the porch awhile and then strolled down to the pond.

  “Did Connor Woodall say anything about an arrest?” I asked.

  “I thought you weren’t going to get involved.” He picked up some loose pebbles at the edge of the water and began plunking them out where the moon was mirrored on the surface. Around us, the little spring peepers went silent.