“Yes, we do have radar and we use it on this road to keep hot dogs from toasting themselves.”
“I’m not going to wreck.” Being chastised made me sullen.
“I’ll take care of it this time. You don’t want to know what happens to your insurance when you get a ticket like the one he was about to write.”
Rudy obviously hadn’t checked my driving record.
“Thanks, Rudy.” I gritted my teeth in frustration, but I didn’t want to sound petulant. Junior had been mad enough to haul me to jail, if he could’ve found a way to get me out of the car.
“Where you headed?”
The plant rescue sounded lame as I explained it to hulking, bemused Rudy.
He cooed at Bud and gave him one last pat on the head, like he was palming a basketball. “Keep ‘er in the road, A’vry.”
Bud craned out the window to watch his new friend return to his patrol car.
Steep roads and sparsely populated hills don’t present many turnoffs, so I found the plant dig without getting lost. Bud stayed in the car happily dreaming of his morning spent meeting new enemies and old friends.
I carried the gardening gloves Mom had encouraged me to bring. I doubted their marks of wear would camouflage my inexperience, but I joined the other plant rescuers. Thanks to Bud’s antics and that baby-faced deputy, I was late for whatever speeches everyone had gathered around to hear. The group—mostly older women—were bundled in L.L. Bean jackets and wool scarves, their cheeks pink and their eyes bright with gardening zeal.
At the center of a loose half circle stood two women: Maggy Avinger, in her practical corduroy pants and faded plaid shirt coat, and a young woman dressed in a wool pantsuit who clearly had no intention of digging anything. As I joined the edge of the group, Maggy gave me a small wave and kept talking.
“—Lisa Livson, the sales agent for the development, has graciously helped us get permission for our efforts.”
Lisa, the woman in the pantsuit, nodded to the group and flashed a quick smile, her teeth peroxide-bright against her dark lipstick.
“You all know our sense of urgency,” Maggy continued. “Lots of native plants to be relocated and not much time to do it.”
Even by late morning, the weak winter sun hadn’t done much to warm this hollow. I glanced around at the group. Nobody else had donned their gardening gloves, so I folded mine and jammed my hands in my pockets to keep my fingers warm. Despite the cold, maybe because of it, the assembled looked eager to start digging.
“Dot Downing has marked each plant or cluster with one of these flags.” Maggy held up a tiny caution-orange flag on a coathanger-wire stake. Easy to spot, the flags dotted the winter-brown hillside all around us. “Dot certainly knows whereof she speaks. These have been her woods for—how long?”
A stocky woman wearing a tatty oversized sweater, gray frizz sticking out around her wool toboggan, stood next to Maggy and looked a bit embarrassed at the attention. Or sad. “Longer than we’ll mention,” Dot said, her voice soft.
Maggy slipped her arm around Dot’s shoulders. “Dot and Keena Brown also wrote down for us some information on the plants and their degree of rarity. None of us really appreciated how special these cove forest habitats were until Dot and Keena began doing some research.”
I studied Magnolia Avinger with a new appreciation, amazed at her good humor and calm when I knew what hung over her like a malevolent threat. Her abusive husband’s long illness, the embarrassment and expense of his garish gift to himself, and his dangerous accusation would have swamped most anyone. She could try to ignore the threat his accusation posed, but it had already leaked out—Mr. Mack’s anonymous letter proved that. As I watched her pull everyone together to save some plants, I realized I’d have to pull her along to save herself. She’d have to deal with the problem her husband had bequeathed whether she wanted to or not.
“Typical, isn’t it?” An unusually husky voice murmured close to my ear. I turned, startled by how close he stood. A pair of thick-lashed brown eyes and a face that hadn’t said good morning to a razor were capped by an unruly mass of too-long brown curls. His out-door gear looked more gonzo snowboarder than master gardener. “We value what we have only after we destroy it,” he said, still standing too close, but turning back to face Maggy.
I didn’t respond to the cynic philosopher.
“Did I see you on the road, on the way up?” he said, his voice just above a whisper. “Pulled by a couple of cops?”
“What makes you think it was me?” I whispered, feeling guilty talking during Maggy’s instructions, like naughty kids whispering in the back of math class.
“Not many burgundy 1960s-vintage Mustang convertibles around here—or anywhere, for that matter.” A wry grin lifted the corner of his mouth.
“You aren’t from around here, are you?” I said.
“Ah, the classic hold-’em-at-arm’s-length-but-feign-interest question. Gosh, how did you know?”
“Because you stand too close.”
He grinned broadly, flashing perfectly straight teeth, but he didn’t step back.
The group was breaking up, shuffling off in clusters. Thanks to Chatty Boy, I’d missed my assignment.
“Glad to see you two know someone here.” Maggy approached, offering us copies of Dot Downing’s plant research.
“No,” he said, taking a paper. “We haven’t met.”
“I thought surely—well, Noah works at your dad’s newspaper. Avery Andrews, Noah Lakefield.”
We studied each other, reprocessing previous misconceptions.
“You’re the lawyer.”
I nodded, at a disadvantage. My dad, an unreconstructed engineer, had bought the Dacus newspaper more to have old machines to work on than from any affinity for disseminating information. He hadn’t said anything about hiring a new reporter. Then again, I’d been in Charleston for several weeks working on a case. I had to wonder what this guy was doing in Dacus, besides scraping the bottom of the journalistic barrel. A really bad journalist? A checkered past? The witness protection program? To be fair, he might be thinking the same thing about me. At least I belonged here, I told myself.
“Your patch is right over here. We’ll put you two together. Noah, let me get you a shovel. We need some brawn to get those saplings up. We’re not sure we’ll be able to salvage any of the dogwoods. I won’t think about that. It’ll make me cry.”
She led us across a clearing to a shaded slope. “Here’s the wrapping material. Cut out well around the roots, lay the plant on the fabric, and wrap it up, like so. Don’t shake the dirt loose from the roots.” She deftly dug around and lifted out something that looked like a dull, shriveled weed and rolled it into a square of some kind of space-age material.
“We’re lucky it’s been a mild winter. The dormant plants will have an easier time of it. Just stack them loosely here, and the trailer crew will come by for them.”
Noah and I stood awkwardly on either side of her. He looked even more intimidated than I felt. Somehow, knowing these were endangered plants made me nervous. They were too valuable to be trusted to my inexperience.
“What are these?” Noah asked, surveying the brown weeds marked by orange flags.
“These are nodding onion,” Maggy said. “That’s faded trillium. For poultices and to stop bleeding. You’ll have to look carefully, because they’ve browned back a bit for winter. Those are monkshood, for making aconite.”
Maggy must have noticed Noah’s discomfiture. “Here’s a trowel. Why don’t you work here on these smaller plants for a while. Avery can help you if you have questions. I’ll get you later, for some heavy lifting with the shrubs.”
I started to admit my inexperience but then bit my lip. Judging from the way he held his trowel, like a chopstick, he knew even less about gardening than I did, sad to say.
Maggy headed toward another group but froze, staring up into a tree so large I could have disappeared behind it. “I had no idea Dot had black walnu
t in here,” she said, more to herself than to me or Noah. She blinked, her eyes damp. “There’s more here than we can possibly save. Why, oh, why did she sell?”
She cut herself off with a shake of her head and moved on to join the next group, focused on what she could fix and walking past what she couldn’t. Noah and I both stared up at the wide-arching branches of the winter-bare tree.
“Black walnut?” he asked.
“A dark, very hard wood, for furniture. Very expensive, I guess because it’s rare. My dad likes to work with it, and so did my granddad.”
Noah craned his neck back to see the tree canopy, the leafless branches spread far above us in a delicate filigree. “It’s beautiful just as it is, isn’t it?”
It was beautiful. What would happen to it? Surely, if it had to be cut down, they’d sell the timber so someone could make something beautiful with it. They couldn’t just lay waste to it all.
To keep from thinking about the tree and the look of loss on Maggy’s face, I turned my attention to the huddled little weeds at our feet. I was, after all, the closest thing to an expert in our group. I had to set a good example.
After our first hesitant efforts, we fell into a reasonably productive rhythm and didn’t have to concentrate on every move.
“So,” I asked, “who talked you into spending Saturday morning up here playing in the dirt?”
“A couple I met at a university lecture last week—local Sierra Club members—mentioned it, said they were coming. Seemed like a worthwhile project, and a good story for the paper at the same time.”
“Sierra Club, huh?” Up here, that name elicited visions of granola crunchers and leftover hippies with canoes. Natives who have lived here for generations distrust outsiders who preach about how to be stewards of the land, but as better roads and too much discretionary income brought more outsiders in, I was beginning to see that stewardship was easier when developers weren’t waving huge wads of cash in somebody’s face.
As if he read my thoughts, he asked, “Do you know Dot Downing, the lady who sold this land?”
“No, not really.”
“I just wondered why she’d sell to somebody like Lionel Shoal.”
“Who’s he?”
“Thought you were from around here,” he teased.
I didn’t grace him with a response.
“He’s moved in touting his new conservancy development. Golden Cove, he calls it. He’s got a story for every listener. Pure bullshit. Allegedly, an abandoned gold mine sits somewhere on the property, so he’s talking to some people about the investment potential in mineral rights that’ll help pay for their vacation home up here. To others, he’s talking about the conservation easement on common areas that’ll preserve a huge chunk of pristine cove forest. It’s all gold-plated bull-shit. Somebody’s not reading the fine print. Including, I’m afraid, Dot Downing.”
“What do you mean?” I stopped digging.
“I mean she’s the first one he sold—how do you say it here?—a pig in a poke? She swallowed his snake-oil spiel. Now that reality is dawning, she’s got serious seller’s remorse. With good reason. Didn’t you notice her crying this morning?”
I did remember Maggy’s consoling arm around Dot’s shoulders, but I hadn’t seen the tears. I pulled a square wrapper off the stack to sit on. The time-honored mountain tradition of hunkering—sitting on the heels of your work boots—is a male-only tradition. Most women aren’t aerodynamically built for that. Noah, with his long legs and nonexistent backside, had hunkering mastered, though.
“Why don’t you talk to her?” he said. “Can’t you lawyers find some clever way to out-con a con artist?”
Before I could explain that lawyers in South Carolina can’t solicit clients and that land sales aren’t easy to set aside, the sound of scuffled leaves interrupted us. Maggy was coming down the slope with a girl in tow.
“Good job, there. Good job. Noah, make sure you’re getting all the root you possibly can. That one there was once used in rheumatiz ointment. I’ve brought you some help.”
A long, wispy girl with flyaway waist-length hair and doe eyes peeking through her bangs let herself be drawn forward, tucked under Maggy’s arm. She was older than I’d first thought—maybe fifteen or sixteen.
“This is Jesse Ruffin. Avery. Noah. It’ll be good to have you here with these delicate plants, Jesse. They need your gentle touch. Do you have any gloves? Good. Keep your fingers out of your mouth and away from your eyes and nose. Some of these”—she pointed to where Noah was digging—”are poisonous.”
Noah jerked his hands back as if he’d been burned.
“No, no. Didn’t mean to alarm you. Just be aware they can be irritants.”
Noah didn’t look reassured.
“I’ll round up some gardening gloves,” she offered.
He nodded, grateful.
Jesse settled down to work without a word, her hair over her face and her grasp of the trowel clumsy but determined.
“Avery,” Maggy said, “could you come with me a minute?”
I stood and started after her, then thought to toss Noah my gloves. He was surreptitiously contemplating his fingers as if wondering what poisoning himself would feel like.
Maggy marched off some distance before she stopped to talk to me. The small groups had been strategically scattered to get the best coverage of the area, so no other groups were in view. Military generals could take notes from this woman’s tactical planning.
“Avery, I wasn’t expecting Jesse up here today. She grew up down the street from me, so I feel more than a little protective of her. I’d like her to work here with you.”
“Sure.”
She must have noticed my puzzled expression. “Jesse needs some friends right now. Her dad took off a week or so ago for parts unknown. Good riddance, if you ask me, but her mother isn’t taking it well. Lots of people around town know the story, so I’ll just be blunt. Len Ruffin abused his wife, and I fear he turned his attentions to Jesse before he left town.”
“Dear Lord.” I kept myself from glancing back at the willowy twig-girl and tried to stop imagining too much.
“Her mother hasn’t been able to give Jesse enough support. She’s wrestling with her own guilt and her money troubles. Planning to go back to college, finish the schooling she interrupted to marry that sorry excuse of a man, but it’ll be a while before she can get a better job. She’s a mess right now.”
“So he ran off with another woman, or what?”
She shrugged. “Who knows. Probably. They can always find a new victim.”
“Maybe Ms. Ruffin is afraid the—” I cut myself off before I spit out an expletive. “Afraid he’ll come back,” I said.
Maggy blinked, as if she hadn’t considered that possibility. “That may be.”
“Sounds like a candidate for the better-off-dead club.” I regretted it as soon as I said it, remembering too late her own not-much-lamented husband had been dead less than two weeks. Here she was, so fiercely protective of little Jesse Ruffin. I wondered again why she wasn’t able to defend herself.
She looked startled. I shouldn’t have been so blunt. After all, I didn’t know Len Ruffin or his wife. I’d only seen their daughter, her eyes downcast, looking as rare and fragile as the wildflowers she was tending.
“Has her mom got somebody tracking him down, trying to get some child support?”
Maggy shook her head. “Absolutely not. I discouraged that. No need drawing him back into their lives.”
That made sense. But only if Jesse’s mom could find a way to keep the family afloat.
“Thanks for telling me,” I said. Likely nothing I could do but be nice to her, but at least I could avoid treading carelessly on a sensitive subject with Jesse.
Maggy wasn’t listening. She was staring so intently over my shoulder that I turned to follow her gaze.
“What in the world . . .” she muttered.
Across a ravine, hidden behind a slight rise and a hed
ge of undergrowth, I glimpsed faint outlines of caution yellow.
“Is that what I think it is?” Her voice was raspy, angry. “They aren’t supposed to be working with equipment anywhere near that area. They aren’t supposed to be there at all.”
She looked around, as if for backup or guidance. Then she strode down the hill to get a better look, leaving me wondering whether I should go back to saving shriveled weeds or follow her. I glanced back where Noah and Jesse sat hunched over their digging, then turned to see Maggy disappear alone down the sharp slope.
I didn’t take long to decide. I began my own shambling descent down the hill.
4
Midday Saturday
We hopped and slid down the hill into the ravine, then I followed Maggy as she pulled herself from tree to tree up another, steeper slope, then down into a broad, sheltered draw.
In the clearing sat a large bulldozer, eclipsing the toy-sized Bobcat beside it. The equipment sat silent, with no one in sight, but the size of the dozer implied power and noise and destruction.
The clearing where we stood was deserted. I looked across the ravine, but couldn’t see Noah and Jesse. In these steep, heavily forested hills, things are quickly lost from view, even in winter.
‘They weren’t supposed to be anywhere near this area with equipment.” Maggy’s voice was raw with emotion. “Look at the damage they’ve already done, cutting in here with that dozer. This is a wetlands area. They aren’t supposed to be here.”
She paced, unable to catch her breath. “They can’t do this! He said—Avery.” She spun to face me. “You can figure out a way to stop him. Can’t you? This isn’t right. They weren’t supposed to do this.”
She stopped, struggling for breath, angry that words or actions couldn’t convey her fear and frustration. She’d feel a lot better if she let fly with a string of cuss words. That’s what I would have been tempted to do.
We stood in a thick forest lush with undergrowth even in the winter’s-end March chill. But I didn’t see any water anywhere.
“Wetlands?” I asked.
She nodded, her eyes red-rimmed, angry. “The water table is high here. In summer, it supports plants between summer rain showers. He agreed to leave this area as a conservancy easement, not to disturb it. That was what finally convinced Dot to sell her land, that he would maintain this and other natural areas. Guess he couldn’t resist selling the view. And selling his soul at the same time.”
Hog Wild Page 4