Gone to Green

by Judy Christie

  In between all of this, I was doing some digging of my own, still trying to get to the real story on the newspaper's finances. I had learned in journalism school to follow the money to the heart of a story, and used this approach at work. I relentlessly analyzed spreadsheets and went to Iris Jo with questions.

  Mostly Lee Roy, my money man, stayed out of my way, unless I trapped him in his office. Sometimes I thought he deliberately went the other way when he saw me coming.

  "Oh, Lois, just heading out to make sales calls," he often said. "Need to go check some racks" was another of his lines. I finally forced him to sit down with me and go over a list of advertisers and tried to chart a budget for the third and fourth quarters of the year, an exercise that seemed to displease Lee Roy on every level.

  "We've been doing it the other way for years," he said, with a sneer. "It works. Why go fooling around with it when it works?"

  "Lee Roy, I have to know more about what is coming in." I felt my face getting warm. "The last time I looked, my name was on the bank loan."

  For some reason during this conversation, Pastor Jean's sermon that first week in Green popped into my mind. She had said God gives us wisdom to do what we're supposed to do. After Lee Roy stalked out, I dug around in a stack of papers on my desk and found the notes I jotted that day. "God guides you, no matter who you are. He surrounds you with love and mercy. He provides answers when the questions are hard." I sure hoped so.

  One of the questions I had on my mind was about the girl Katy, and I finally remembered to ask Iris Jo about her. Iris looked solemn and then slowly started talking, her voice quivering slightly.

  "Katy's somewhat troubled." She paused. "She's mad at her mother for remarrying after the death of her father a couple of years ago. Then she lost her boyfriend, Matt, in a bad car wreck out near the church."

  Iris Jo rummaged around on the top of her desk and pulled out the obituary, which was dated less than a year ago.

  "He was a good boy," she said, tears filling her eyes. "They said he was driving too fast, swerved, overcorrected, and hit a tree coming home from Katy's house. He went to church, was one of those boys you think is going to amount to something. Katy quit coming to church for quite a while after that, and I notice her hanging around downtown smoking. That's a hard thing for a girl her age ... and so soon after her Daddy."

  Iris Jo looked up at me as though sizing me up somehow.

  "He was my son."

  Stunned, I did not know what to say, but I felt tears in my eyes and dabbed at them. I leaned over and hugged her. "Oh, Iris Jo, I am so, so sorry."

  "I don't know why the Lord took him," she said, the tears falling more steadily now, "but I know he's in a better place, and one of these days I'll see him again."

  Frozen, I stood by her desk.

  "You remember when you asked me one time why I wasn't more bothered about the sale of the family paper?" she asked. "What I didn't say is that I've learned that most of the stuff that bothers us just isn't worth the energy."

  Right then the phone rang, and I had never been as happy to be interrupted in my life.

  As I went into my office, I thought back over how Iris Jo was cheerful, but in a gentle, kind way. She was not an exuberant woman, and I saw now she was still trying to thaw from her unspeakable grief. How could I be near someone for hours on end and not realize how much hurt she held inside? I thought of Katy, too, and wondered if she hung around the paper because Iris Jo was there.

  Going to Route 2 that night, my heart felt heavy. I cried when I drove by Iris's house.

  Settling into the house in the country was tougher than I expected, harder than settling into the newspaper. I slowly unpacked my belongings and tried unsuccessfully to make it feel like home. Nearly two full weeks passed before I spent a night there, always coming up with excuses to stay at the Lakeside.

  "I don't have my phone yet," I said to Iris Jo, "and you know how lousy the cell service is." "Oh, I just like visiting with your mother at the motel," I told Kevin. "It's convenient, and everything at home is such a mess," I said to Tammy.

  During my first week of staying at the house, members of the church began showing up-almost like they had been on a stakeout, waiting to see my car overnight in the driveway. The casserole brigade brought supper two or three nights that week, delicious homemade food delivered in Pyrex dishes with names written on masking tape on the bottom. An older man came over, volunteering to help break down the boxes piled on the screened front porch. Someone had cleaned up my yard, and Iris Jo told me it was Chris Craig.

  "That name doesn't ring a bell," I said, puzzled over who would do something so nice.

  "He's that good-looking catfish farmer down the road, a coach at the school," she said. "He's a regular volunteer at Grace Community. His wife died of breast cancer three years ago. He took up catfish farming as a hobby of sorts-really super person.

  "Oh ... I remember meeting him. The guy you were hugging at church. Do you two date?" I clearly knew little about Iris Jo's personal life.

  "Good heavens, no!" she said, almost snorting. "He's more like a son or a brother to me. I wish he could find a good woman.

  Touched by everyone's help, I didn't let on that I was afraid to stay way out in the country by myself. It was so alien from my city life, which I found myself yearning for on a regular basis. I longed for my condo. I missed the crazy busy newsroom and my comfort zone. I began to think of relocating when my year was up, to New York or Chicago, a big city with lots going on and fewer people nosing into my business.

  Other than spending nights there, in the first few months I spent as little time as possible at the house, almost moving into my office, with a supply of microwavable food and some of my favorite pieces of art.

  "Good grief, Miss Lois," Tammy said. "How are Iris Jo and I supposed to look good with the new boss if we always get here after you do and leave before you?" She even devised a contest to see who could get me out of the building earlier, but after a few weeks gave up.

  Long evening phone calls with Marti became my habit, helping me put off going home. One Friday night she finally challenged me on it.

  "I've got a date with that new guy in marketing and have got to get off this phone," she said. "You have to get a life."

  I pretended to be indignant, but I knew what she meant. That night I rolled up my sleeves and began to transform the country house into my home. I emptied boxes and placed books neatly on shelves, with the hope the Grace cardboard ministry guy would come back by to help me. I hung pictures and pulled out knick-knacks and lined up my antique pottery collection.

  The next morning I cleaned and polished, appreciating how the light gave everything a kind of soft glow.

  Coffee cup in hand, I walked around the yard and noticed how a few things were already beginning to bud. My mother and grandmother had taught me a lot about flowers, some of it by osmosis. A flowering quince was in bloom, as was a large, healthy forsythia. Several patches of what we called daffodils but local people were calling jonquils were in bloom.

  My neighbor and his three mutts drove by in his beat-up pickup truck. He gave a short beep of the horn and waved.

  For a moment, I felt settled.

  11

  "Please keep my aunt Johnnie Pruitt in your prayers as she recovers from a four-wheeler accident last weekend. Although I won't publicize how old she is, Aunt Johnnie admits she was born the year Huey Long was first elected governor. She has never had a driver's license and said it was high time she learned. `I wanted to take my son's toy for a spin,' she said. `I'm tired of sitting out here in the country by myself."'

  -The Green News-Item

  I am not sure what surprised me more about spring in North Louisiana-that it was so incredibly beautiful or that it passed so quickly. Over a period of just a couple of weeks, everything exploded in beauty and color, from dogwood trees that dotted the woods on my way to work to huge, heirloom azaleas that made old streets downtown look like tourist att
ractions.

  For weeks now I had described Green to out of town friends and relatives as shabby without the chic. Suddenly the town looked groomed, planned-special. Even the forlorn Lakeside Annex neighborhood looked better, with big old bushes bursting out in bloom.

  After my years of one plant on the patio, I discovered something new in my yard every time I turned around. The sturdy little tree in the front yard was a pink dogwood. The woods on the edge of my back yard were dotted with pinkish purplish trees called redbuds. It was like living in some sort of home and garden show.

  As quickly as it came, it went.

  Two days after we ran a photo layout of beautiful yards, complete with our first reader-submitted photos, we got a heavy rain and most of the blooms were knocked off the azaleas. The yellow pollen that had covered everything was washed away.

  "That I do not miss," I told Marti. "It freaked me out at first-my nose started itching, my eyes watering, and suddenly everything around town was covered with yellow dust. The car wash on the edge of town even gave pollen checks, instead of rain checks. Can you believe that?"

  "Sounds like local color to me," she said with a laugh. "Not your average boring town."

  "There could certainly be worse places to spend a year," I said. "There's something about my house where I can relax and be myself. I've met so many nice people in the past few months, too. None of them are you, of course, but they're good people."

  The spring weather had a softening effect on lots of people, as though they were coming out of hibernation. The winter had not been bad at all, certainly not by Midwest standards, but the days had often been gray and chilly. Downtown, always a bit frayed around the edges, perked up with springtime.

  More people were "stirring around," as local residents liked to say. The library, where I had become a regular customer, was busier, ranging from older people learning to use the Internet to school kids working on term papers. The drug store put up a fascinating spring display of photographs of graduating seniors.

  The Holey Moley Antique Mall even gained several new vendors. Over my first few months in Green, the owners, Rose Parker and Linda Murphy, the Linder who worked for Major, became two of my closest acquaintances. They pieced the business together around their busy lives and seemed pleased when they made a ten-dollar sale. I wondered sometimes how they paid the rent.

  "God always provides," Rose said on a regular basis. She was one of those people who believe things will turn out right, offsetting Linda's perpetual glumness. "I know the good Lord is looking out for us today. It's amazing how things come together."

  Rose had grown up in Green, was married to a farmer twenty years her senior, and was the hardest-working woman I had ever met. She was also the mail carrier out on Route 2. "I know who you're getting love letters from and who you owe," she said, with a smile.

  "No love letters," I said. "Only bills."

  Linda had joined the Holey Moley partnership with caution. She was a woman who did not expect things to turn out well, probably with good reason. She was miserable working at Major's office but needed the benefits. How she stuck with the job, I could not figure out, slowly learning how badly he behaved, barking orders, snapping at her and treating her like dirt.

  "He's just mean as a snake," Rose said. "Mean as a snake."

  Linda had been single for years, after marrying a "sloppy drunk" when she was just out of high school. The men she dated were invariably losers who hurt her in some way. Her latest boyfriend had broken a date with her on a Saturday, right after I first met her, and remarried his ex-wife the next Wednesday.

  "I'm not white trash," she told me once, "but I act like white trash."

  Linda's parents were in terrible physical health, and her mother had dementia. "Half the time she doesn't know me any more," Linda said. "And she's doing things like putting her bra on over her church dress and calling to ask if I've seen Boots. That cat died twenty years ago."

  Once more I realized the terrible burdens most people carry around everyday.

  Rose and Linda admitted during one of our first conversations that they knew little about marketing. They used a couple of my ideas to build the Holey Moley's business, but struggled to get people from the interstate to downtown.

  Sitting in my office one day, I stared out at a line of snowy white Bradford pear trees along the edge of the newspaper's property, and it hit me. Why couldn't The News-Item lead an effort to bring back downtown, to get people to clean up their property and to shop in their hometown? What would it take to make downtown vibrant again? Maybe this was a way I could make a difference in this little community.

  The pretty spring and the short burst of increased interest in the area had given me a glimpse of something new in Green, an indefinable characteristic that almost felt like hope. Even though The News-Item only had a dozen employees, we were one of the biggest businesses downtown, plus we had a small measure of clout in town, mostly from the social standing of the McCullers.

  "We can use the power of the newspaper to try to rally residents," I said to Tom. He seemed delighted, ready to tackle an editorial crusade.

  "We can tie that into profiles of downtown businesses," Alex said. "We can also examine how the area got into such rotten shape and how it might get out." He paused. "Maybe you could even splurge and let me visit a similar place or two that have turned their downtowns around."

  Visiting with Rose one Saturday, I broached the idea of forming a Downtown Green Association. She was initially excited about the possibility but deflated fairly quickly after talking to Linda.

  "We tried something like that once, and it didn't work," Linda said. This was another of those sentences I'd learned to despise. The number of things Green had tried before with bad results confounded me. To hear local people talk, nothing had gone right since about 1959.

  I took a deep breath and persisted. "What could it hurt to try again? We could just get together with some snacks and visit about new ideas. I'm new. You have new vendors. Maybe we could even talk Eva Hillburn into coming."

  My contact with Eva had been minimal, but I had learned she was quite important in Green. Very little happened without her stamp of approval. She was deeply involved behind the scenes in local politics and a generous donor to many nonprofits. Although her older brother had the public persona, I'd come to believe Eva was probably more powerful.

  Setting up the first meeting took some doing, but I managed to pull it off. We gathered in the boardroom of the newspaper and had box lunches from the Cotton Boll. I almost felt like I was back in Dayton, except the boxes had smiley faces drawn on them with a black marker and a note with each person's order.

  Eva arrived late, but she did show up. Rose was out delivering the mail, but Linda was there, along with Iris Jo and a variety of others from downtown businesses. Pastors from the big Baptist and Methodist churches downtown came, including Pastor Mali, the new foreign guy wearing his native dress, a tepenu. His arrival in town had caused somewhat of a stir, and I always enjoyed seeing his cheerful face. Lee Roy did not bother to show up, a point I planned to challenge.

  "Let's open with a quick recap of what has been done before and how we can build on that," I said, after thanking everyone for coming.

  "I beg your pardon, Miss Lois," one of the bankers said. "We haven't had our prayer yet."

  This was something that intrigued me about Green. People had not gotten ashamed of their religion down here. The prayer, by the Baptist preacher, was almost poetic, including asking God to "look after Miss Lois and help her as she tries to guide us." I was always overwhelmed at how quick people were to pray for me, and I thought the words set just the tone we needed for the meeting. In fact, I got so wrapped up in the idea that I asked Pastor Mali from the Methodist church to close us in prayer.

  From that meeting, we made progress with fits and starts. At first members got hung up on a name and mission statement, but Eva moved us along. "Friends," she said with a firm but friendly tone to her v
oice, "we need to make something happen. Downtown Green needs our action."

  In just a handful of meetings, we came up with what we called our Green Forward Goals, which quickly became the GFGs. These included a downtown cleanup day, a special Fourth of July ice cream social and sale day, and a Fall Festival the first weekend of October.

  Sometimes I would notice Eva watching me with a serious look on her face, but she seldom had much to say to me. She was out of town a lot and extremely busy, so I was always happy to see her arrive. Something about her presence gave the group some heft.

  After the third meeting, she stopped on her way out. "Lois, I'd like to invite you to dinner with me at the country club one night. I apologize for not connecting with you sooner, welcoming you properly to town."

  I hesitated before I said "yes." I had been to the Oak Crest Country Club several times already, always on business, usually courting an advertiser with Lee Roy. I did not find it very welcoming. In part, the decor looked like something out of the mid-1950s, with heavy drapes, sea foam green walls, white linen tablecloths, and a parquet dance floor. Beyond that, it seemed snooty. I owned a business and was approaching middle age, but I felt like a kid eating at the grown-up table.

  However, I could not turn Eva down after all she had done for Green Forward and the newspaper. "Sure, I'd love to go," I said, smiling. "That'll be great."

  Wearing a nice outfit I bought from Miss Barbara, who was still complaining about her ads, I met Eva on Saturday night. We were seated at a table in the corner, far enough away from the combo playing sixties songs. We each ordered sweet iced tea. I noticed with a small measure of amusement that several vocal people in the local anti-liquor-by-the-drink campaign were having wine, beer, or a strawberry daiquiri with their meals. Maybe the newspaper should do a story on where liquor was sold and consumed in the parish.