“I know that’s a lot,” Mrs. Fowler apologized, “but it’s been five months and I’m sure Mr. Lacy didn’t realize . . .”
Kate made herself smile reassuringly. “It’s all right. It’s just that I don’t have my checkbook with me.”
“Oh, no hurry,” said Mrs. Fowler, anxious to put money talk behind them. “No hurry at all.”
Nevertheless, as Kate returned to her car with the cheese she realized that $347.63 probably represented a full month’s profit for Mrs. Fowler. Lacy really shouldn’t have let it go so long. On the other hand, if Jake had been automatically taking care of it for him, Lacy had probably forgotten that his day to day out-of-pocket expenses were now his own responsibility. She and Jake had always paid the utilities at the farm and restocked the freezer and pantry when they were down, because Jake said Lacy was too proud to take money. Evidently not too proud to let Jake pay his bills, though.
She approached the cutoff to the road past the Honeycutt farm, and she saw Willy Stewart out on his tractor, an enormous John Deere with a closed-in cab and some sort of wide mechanism trailing along behind.
It inched across the field, axle-deep in lush green oats, and it looked to Kate like some prehistoric brontosaurus munching its way across a herbaceous plain.
She signaled for a right turn just as Miss Emily zoomed up from the opposite direction with her left-turn signal flashing erratically from its electric-purple fender.
Kate waved and started past, but Miss Emily honked her horn and signaled for Kate to roll down her window.
“Stop and visit with me a few minutes,” the older woman invited.
“Okay,” she called, and Miss Emily whipped in front of her to lead the way through the drive and around to the back. Since coming to the country, Kate often amused herself by trying to spot houses that actually used their front doors. Often, the front entrances were completely abandoned. They sat in stately isolation facing beautiful lawns unmarked by even a walk to connect doors to the grounds. Most seemed to be used only for home funerals or weddings. Unless a house was as grand as Gilead, or the callers total strangers, everyone came to the back door automatically and passed through the kitchen to more formal areas of the house.
Emily Bryant slung an armload of books and folders onto the deacon’s bench inside her glassed-in sun porch. The orange jacket of her yellow and orange pantsuit followed. Beneath, a fuzzy orange jersey molded her plump torso. She looked like a little round tangerine as she bustled about her kitchen.
“Well, that’s one week I’m glad to see finished. I had those McNeeley twins in my office four times this week. They’re going to spend the rest of the year in detention hall if they don’t straighten up their wing feathers and start flying in the same direction as their teachers. Their daddy was just the same but I was twenty years younger when he came through school and there was only one of him. How was Robbie? Was the doctor nice? And wasn’t that Duke game the most exciting thing you ever saw?”
Kate laughed. “I didn’t see it.”
“Well, neither did I,” Miss Emily admitted. “Those dratted McNeeleys. But I heard the end of overtime on my way home. Iced tea, or would you rather have a Pepsi with something in it?”
“Tea’s fine,” said Kate, who no longer saw anything odd about the ubiquitous beverage.
From icy January through sweltering August, few were the true Tar Heels who didn’t keep a half-gallon jar of iced tea in the refrigerator year-round. Although most of the towns were wet now, the counties were still predominantly dry, so everyone had grown up on soft drinks or iced tea. Until recently, with or without lemon were the only choices offered. City restaurants had learned to ask before adding sugar, but most crossroads cafes still took for granted that their patrons expected iced tea to arrive at the table strong and sweet.
“But wasn’t Christ’s first miracle turning water to wine?” Kate had asked when originally confronted with the Bible Belt’s official antipathy to anything alcoholic.
“Yeah,” Jake had grinned, “but the Southern Baptists’ first miracle was turning the wine to iced tea.”
Remembering, Kate smiled as she took the tall frosty glass.
Miss Emily smiled back, her plump face rosy beneath the tangled red curls. “Did you hear the baby’s heartbeat today?”
Kate paused in mid-sip. “Yes, I did! How did you know? Was that nurse another of Bessie’s nieces?”
“Just a guess. Well, no, I do listen to what some of the younger teachers tell me and they get so excited when the doctor puts the stethoscope in their ears. Our doctors never thought to let my generation in on the fun. Whenever people start talking about the good old days, I say let them have it. Can you imagine what childbirth must have been like for my mother? You’re not going to have amniocentesis, are you?”
Kate dragged her thoughts away from that miraculous little heartbeat she’d heard today between the sturdier thumps of her own heart. “No, the doctor didn’t say anything about needing it. Why?”
“Oh, well, I expect I’m old-fashioned, but it seems like knowing the sex months ahead is like knowing in July what Santa Claus is going to bring you for Christmas. All the mystery’s gone.”
As she spoke, the back door opened and Bessie Stewart came in with a basket of neatly folded, if bizarrely colored, laundry.
“All what mystery’s gone?” she asked. “Dwight find out who that man was in your packhouse, Kate?”
Again, as with Rob earlier, Kate explained about Jake’s army friend with a similar mole and how she’d found the pictures this morning and relayed the name to Dwight, who, she regretted to report, was too engrossed with basketball to come out this afternoon.
“But it’s the ACC Tournament,” said Miss Emily.
“So I’ve heard,” Kate said dryly. “I’m surprised to see Willy out in the field, Bessie. I thought he was a rabid fan, too.”
“He’s not too partial to Duke,” said Bessie. “’Sides, he’s got a radio on the tractor and I ’spect he heard Duke give Georgia a whipping. Don’t try to talk to him tonight, though. If State don’t beat Maryland, there won’t be no living with that man the rest of March.”
She shook her head when Emily offered tea and passed on through the kitchen to put away the laundry.
“I guess I’d better be on my way,” said Kate, slowly pulling on her jacket.
“Lacy minding his manners any better today?” asked Miss Emily, who seemed to read her shifting mood.
“Some. By the way, who’s Tucker Sauls?”
“Tucker Sauls? He runs a little sawmill up past the county line. Why?”
“No reason. He was there when I got back from dinner with Gordon and Mary Pat. And I might have known that was your niece helping with dinner, Bessie,” she teased as the other returned.
“It’s right nice having her close by,” Bessie said guilelessly.
“What about Tucker Sauls?” Miss Emily persisted.
“Not much. He was there and Lacy introduced him. Said they were going to haul some logs out of the bottom for firewood. I just wondered if he was someone I was supposed to remember since Lacy made a point of introducing him.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t met him before,” said Miss Emily. “They’re old fishing buddies from way back.”
“Had ’em a fish trap down on the creek twenty-five years ago, didn’t they?” asked Bessie with an arched eyebrow.
“Needed tending night and day,” Miss Emily agreed with solemn impishness.
“What?” asked Kate, who sensed a hidden mirth.
“Nothing, nothing,” they chorused.
“Oh, come on,” Kate wheedled. “What were they doing? Courting?”
The thought of Lacy Honeycutt and Tucker Sauls sweet-talking any women into joining them at a fish trap set them giggling like teenagers and Kate had a sudden glimpse of the laughter and intimacy these two had shared for over half a century.
“Well,” said Miss Emily, “you knew that Lacy used to own land on t
he other side of the creek towards Dobbs?”
“Yes. Jake said the farm went all the way to the crossroads before his grandfather divided it.”
“That’s right. Andrew got the homeplace, him being the older; and Lacy got the piece east of Blacksnake Creek. Andrew was always sensible and settled, but Lacy was—”
She hesitated and looked at Bessie.
“Wild,” Bessie said promptly.
“Not really mean, though.”
“Maybe not polecat-mean,” said Bessie, striving for strict fairness, “but you got to say he was the devil’s playmate sometimes. Remember that night he got Hassie Ferrell drunk and left him for dead in the gravehole that’d been dug for old Mr. Tink’s funeral? And the time Willy’s cousin Marcellus—”
“Even dead and skinned, Marcellus should’ve known the difference between a skunk and a possum,” Miss Emily interrupted. “Anyhow, we’re talking about Tucker Sauls and that still he and Lacy used to have down on Lacy’s side of the creek bottom.”
“A still?” asked Kate.
Both women nodded.
“A moonshine still?”
“Just a little one,” said Bessie, still being fair.
“Couldn’t have been very big or they wouldn’t have been able to keep moving it up and down the creek bank till the sheriff got tired of hunting for it,” Miss Emily said complacently. “They weren’t doing it for money. Not like Kezzie Knott. They just wanted something smooth for themselves and a few friends.”
“Would’ve been all right if they kept it to grown-ups,” Bessie chuckled. A gold crown gleamed behind her warm brown lips whenever she laughed.
“They sold white lightning to children?”
“Not sold,” said Miss Emily. “What happened was, Jake followed Lacy down to the still when he was about four one day and pestered them till Tucker Sauls gave him a little noggin. Men! It was just like them to forget little boys don’t have the same constitution as big boys. Jake got drunk as a lord and first he threw up and then he turned green and fell down. Scared the pure mischief out of Lacy and Tucker, too, for once.
“They came trucking up to the house with Jake passed out over Lacy’s shoulder and tried to get him up to bed without Jane noticing.”
“Miss Jane and Mr. Andrew, they didn’t hold with drinking,” said Bessie.
“Bessie doesn’t either,” Miss Emily confided. “She thinks I’m going straight to hell because of that bottle of Dickle I keep under the sink”
“I don’t either say you’re going straight to hell,” said Bessie. “I just say you’re going to have some tall explaining to do, that’s all.”
“Anyhow, Andrew didn’t approve, but he’d sort of turned a blind eye to Lacy’s way ’cause they were brothers,” said Miss Emily. “Jane found out, of course, and sailed into all three of ’em and Andrew took his ax to the still and the fish trap, too.”
“I never heard that story,” Kate laughed.
“Remember the time them two had old Mr. Lavelle Barbour thinking it was Sam Fisher stealing his watermelons?” asked Bessie.
“And the night they put Amos Kornegay’s prize hound in his henhouse so he’d think it’d turned into an eggsucker?”
They told a few more stories of Lacy’s younger days and his practical jokes and heavy rural humor; but when Kate was gone, Miss Emily looked at Bessie and neither needed speech to know that the other also remembered darker things they had not told Kate.
“Wonder what them two old scoundrels are up to now?” asked Bessie.
CHAPTER 10
The object of their mirth and speculation was absent from the house when Kate returned and there was no sign of his fourteen-year-old pickup nor of the dogs.
Kate put away the groceries, changed into jeans and a double layer of loose sweaters since the afternoon was still cool, then rummaged through her cartons until she found a sketchpad and her case of drawing colors.
That morning, she had noticed a cluster of bluets in the grass beside the old well and she carried her pad and pens out, found an old bucket which she upturned for a stool, and began to draw.
Bluets, Quaker-ladies, Houstonia caerulea. By any of its names, the minute blue flower held a special charm for Kate. The flat, fourpetaled flowers were seldom more than half an inch across and grew on slender stems only three or four inches tall. Alone, they went almost unnoticed, but when found in large colonies, the effect was like wisps of blue lace dropped carelessly upon the grass.
Size and depth of color could vary. Kate had seen some so pale that they were almost white; in others, the blue echoed a spring sky. These that she had discovered were very tiny and of a rich blue that was almost purple. Instead of the usual yellow, they had deep reddish-blue eyes.
She filled a sheet of her sketchpad with careful, exact details, and the colors of her fine-tipped felt pens were as vibrant as the bluets themselves.
Absorbed in recreating the image of stem, leaf, and minute seedpod, Kate had barely noticed the sound of a chain saw from the woods below the wide fields; but gradually, she realized it had to be Lacy working down there in dogged solitude.
Gordon Tyrrell’s reminder of how Jake’s death must have devastated Lacy, followed by Bessie and Miss Emily’s recital of the old man’s younger, mischief-loving days nibbled at Kate’s conscience. Whether Lacy would admit it or not, each was all the other had left of Jake right now, and shouldn’t youth defer to age?
She dug up a pair of old gardening gloves and set off down the slope, following the chain saw’s high shriek.
The woods were a mixture of deciduous trees and pines. Maples and elms were beginning to flower, oaks were still bare. Along the edge of the field, every sassafras twig was precisely tipped with a single greenish-yellow flower, each so stiffly stylized that Kate wondered if they’d come down unchanged from the Triassic.
Beyond the curve of the woodline, she found Lacy cutting off tree limbs with an agility to belie his seventy-odd years. He maneuvered the heavy raucous saw with practiced deliberation, separating limbs from trunk until the recently felled tree was reduced to an unencumbered log. She watched him cut the thicker limbs into stove-sized pieces and he didn’t notice her presence until the three dogs circled past to greet her. Distracted by their rush, Lacy eased off on the saw’s throttle and looked around warily.
Kate picked her way through the brushy limbs until she was near enough to shout above the motor, “Can I help you? Load wood or something?”
He shut off the saw to hear.
“I’m sorry,” said Kate. “I didn’t mean to slow you down. I just wondered if there was something I could do to help.”
To her relief, instead of growling a refusal, Lacy looked at her dubiously, “You reckon you ought to strain yourself?” he asked with rough delicacy.
“A little exercise will be good for me,” she assured him.
“Well,” he said, looking at the fallen debris, “it’d be a help to have the brush piled.”
He dragged a limb past his rusty old pickup and out into the edge of the field. “Ought to be safe to burn it out here.”
“Burn?”
“These here trees has got the borer beetle in ’em,” said Lacy. “We don’t get ’em out and burn the brush, they’ll keep spreading all through these woods.”
He pulled back the pine bark and exposed the runnels where borers had channeled beneath and eaten into the soft cambium layer. Two or three nearby trees showed telltale symptoms of distress by their brown needles.
“Is it bad?” asked Kate, who knew nothing about forest pests. “Can anything be done to stop them?”
“I’m a-doing it!” Lacy said with a flare of his former testiness.
As if he’d heard the shortness in his tone, Kate could actually see him make an effort to tolerate her ignorance.
“See, they don’t hardly mess with healthy trees. Just young ones or ones that already has something wrong with ’em. If I cull out all the ones where they’ve started and burn all the la
ps, it ought to keep ’em down.”
“Except for those three trees, the rest are pretty healthy, aren’t they?” Kate asked hopefully.
Lacy carefully extinguished the cigarette that dangled from the corner of his mouth and looked around the woods with a negative roll of his head. “About a tenth of the pines and maybe even a few hardwoods’ll have to come out.”
He gestured toward a tall pine whose needles were thick and green yet. “See that sawdust? That’s borer beetles.”
Kate went closer and saw white powdery streaks that had spilled down along the trunk from small holes in the rough brown bark. A tenth of the pines! “Can you manage it alone?”
“Tucker Sauls said he’d go shares. Where the wood’s still sound, he can saw ’em into boards. The rest we’ll use for firewood.”
The old man hesitated and fumbled with the chain saw, his eyes not meeting hers. “That’s if it’s all right with you.”
Kate suddenly realized that he was embarrassed, that he was asking her permission because she owned the land now and could veto decisions he’d always made freely before. It was her turn to feel embarrassed.
“Whatever you want to do is fine with me, Lacy. You know more about what a farm needs than I ever will.”
He nodded and abruptly pulled the starter of the gasoline-powered chain saw. It roared to life in a cloud of blue smoke and Lacy returned to work.
Hoping she’d said the right thing, Kate began dragging the unwanted limbs out to the edge of the field. By sunset, Lacy had felled two more trees and her brush pile was head-high and several yards across.
“It’ll make a right good-size bonfire,” said Lacy as she left to start supper.
By eight P.M. Kate had reached a lazy halfway point: she knew she should go to bed, yet she lacked the energy to move. There was a pleasant tiredness in her arms from the unaccustomed labor, the fire Lacy had built in the kitchen range made the room just a little too cozy, and it was lovely to lie somnolently on the wide leather couch and let the television act as a soporific.
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