by Joan Hess
“Dinner for these people?” he echoed, keeping his distance.
Mrs. Jim Bob threw herself into a chair and swept all the pieces of paper onto the floor. “I had this well under control, but now I don’t know what to do!”
“About what, exactly?”
She glared at him. “Haven’t you heard a word I just said? That woman from Charleston, her son, and his fiancée are arriving in a matter of hours. She called to say that the only decent hotel in Farberville was full because of a conference, and they had no other option but to come to Maggody. Two days early, mind you, but she didn’t mention that minor detail. Oh no, she just assumed that it wouldn’t inconvenience me the tiniest bit. I was planning to go to Farberville tomorrow to buy new linens and bath soaps. I wanted to be a gracious hostess. I was going to put potpourri in little baskets on the bedside tables so they’d know we aren’t barbarians. Who knows what they’ll think now?”
Jim Bob gave it his best shot. “It ain’t like they don’t know they’re showing up two days early, so they won’t expect much. I’ll bring home some food from the deli and we can have a right nice picnic on the patio.”
“Are you intending to vacuum the upstairs bedrooms and dust the living room, too?” she said icily. “Does the deli have potpourri?”
“I reckon not,” he acknowledged, since he had no idea what damn fool thing she was talking about. It sounded like fancy cat litter, but he wasn’t about to say so.
Mrs. Jim Bob cradled her head in her hands. “Will this son and his fiancée expect to share a bedroom? This is a God-fearing house, not some sleazy hotel that caters to sinners bent on depravity under this very roof! I called Brother Verber to ask him, but he couldn’t bother to be at the rectory in my hour of need. And you’re just standing there, squinting at the refrigerator and thinking of nothing more than last night’s pot roast and a slice of chocolate cake. I can see it written all over your face, Jim Bob. All you want to do is fill your belly and get back to your office at the SuperSaver, where you can drink whiskey and flirt with the checkout girls. Don’t think for a second that I don’t know what you do down there, except when you’re off visiting some harlot in a cheap apartment.”
Whiskey sounded real good at the moment, but he forced a sympathetic smile and said, “Don’t get so all fired up about this. Did she say why they’re coming early?”
“Her name happens to be Corinne Dawk, and don’t you forget it! All she offered was some lame excuse about how she wanted to spend more time speaking to classes. Why on earth she thinks she can keep their attention for three whole days with her Civil War folderol is beyond me, but I said fine. Then I tried to call Lottie Estes at the high school to let her know, and she wasn’t there. The secretary said Lottie hadn’t even bothered to call in sick. It seems that Lottie has chosen this day for the first time in who knows how many years to simply not show up. Larry Joe’s having to take her home ec classes to the shop to make bird feeders.”
“Could be she had a heart attack and died in her bed.”
Mrs. Jim Bob stood up so abruptly that the chair toppled over. “That is the last thing I need to hear,” she said. “You get on the phone right this minute and call Arly. Tell her to go by and check on Lottie, then call me.”
“Mebbe you should be the one to handle this. After all, you’re running this dog-and-pony show, not me. I need to eat some lunch and get back to the store to work on the payroll taxes. You don’t want the IRS to start sniffing around, do you?”
“At this point, I don’t care if the IRS blows up the supermarket and everyone inside it, including you. Now you make this call while I start dusting the living room. All Perkin’s eldest does is flip a rag from the doorway. I can probably write your epitaph in the dust on the credenza.”
“We have a credenza? What the”—he caught himself—“heck is a credenza? It sounds like a bottle of cheap dago wine.”
“You’d better hope I don’t find any whiskey bottles under the sofa. What’s more, I’d better not find any frilly lace underwear in your bedroom when I empty the dresser drawers. If I do, you’ll find yourself wearing it till the cows come home to roost!”
As she snatched up a dustrag and stomped out of the kitchen, Jim Bob tried to think what all she might find in his dresser drawers. Cigars possibly, condoms probably. The pictures of Cherry Lucinda in a red teddy were stashed away in his desk at the supermarket. Realizing his wife would hear him if he tried to creep upstairs, he resigned himself to calling Arly and putting up with her smart-ass remarks. After telling her about Lottie, he could also point out that it was high time she hunted down Petrol and hauled his skinny ass back to town. Hell, Drainard wasn’t more than fifty miles away. She could go knockin’ door-to-door like a missionary until she found him, then stuff him in the trunk of her car and deliver him to the old folks’ home.
He was halfway across the kitchen when the telephone rang. He picked up the receiver and said, “Yeah?”
“Ah, Mayor Buchanon. I didn’t expect to catch you. This is Harriet Hathaway from the Stump County Historical Society. We met the other night at the town meeting.”
“You backing out of this thing?”
“Don’t be silly. I just had a call from the gentleman who volunteered to make the film. He’s decided to come a few days early, so I thought I might as well, too. This will give us the opportunity to discuss various sites and camera angles. Wendell Streek is very excited about the opportunity to explore the church cemeteries and family plots for names and dates that may prove relevant to his genealogical research. Please let Mrs. Jim Bob know we’ll be there around six o’clock—unless, of course, this might inconvenience her.” She paused, then added without enthusiasm, “We could stay at that motel, I suppose. The Flamenco, or something like that.”
“What the hell,” Jim Bob said, figuring that he was signing his own death certificate. “Y’all might as well come along. The woman from Charleston and her runts are coming today. The more the merrier, long as you don’t mind baloney sandwiches and potato salad.”
“That will be lovely. We’ll see you in a few hours, then. Please let your wife know how much I appreciate her hospitality.”
He hung up, then stared at the telephone, waiting for it to ring again in case some platoon of damn Yankees called to say they’d be camping in the backyard and would need a couple of bales of hay for their horses.
Since there’d be hell to pay for years if he didn’t tell her, he went to the doorway of the living room. Mrs. Jim Bob was on her hands and knees, wiping the baseboards with a dustrag and muttering under her breath.
“That was Miss Hathaway on the phone,” he said. “She and that man from the society will—” He stopped and scratched his head. “What happened to the curtains?”
She glared up at him. “Nothing happened to them. They were looking grimy, so I took them into Farberville to be cleaned. Since when did you start paying attention to the decor? For all you care, I could paint the ceiling black and glue moss on the walls.”
“Why would you want to do something like that?”
“Just go on back to the SuperSaver. I’ll call Arly, and then Miss Hathaway, who probably wants to tell me she’ll be bringing a dozen more members of the society with her, all of them with allergies to dust, dairy products, tomatoes, eggs, and gluten. I don’t have time to watch you stand there and gape like Kevin Buchanon swallowing a lemon drop. I’ll call you later with a shopping list.”
Jim Bob shrugged and went back into the kitchen to make himself a sandwich and return to the SuperSaver. The official Skirmish at Cotter’s Ridge wasn’t supposed to take place until Saturday morning, but he figured there’d be a few opening rounds exchanged before too long.
“Okay, Harve,” I said, wishing I hadn’t called him on an empty stomach, “I’ll go out to Hazzard and write up the burglary, but you have to help me out this weekend. Do you realize how pissed everyone’s going to be when we block the road for half the day? You need to post a deputy at C
ounty 102 to divert the tourists on their way to Branson, and another one outside of Starley City to do the same for traffic headed for Farberville. There were no pickups, station wagons, or chicken trucks during the Civil War. Trust me on this.”
“I ain’t arguing,” the illustrious sheriff of Stump County drawled. A match scritched as he lit up a cheap cigar. Smoking may have been outlawed in every municipal and state building in Arkansas, but Harve Dorfer remained as serenely oblivious as a portly Buddha in a rock garden. “How many folks you got coming to this little battle of yours?”
“I won’t know about the reenactors until they show up, but perhaps no more than three dozen. There’s been no publicity, much to Hizzoner’s disgust, so I doubt we’ll have much in the way of a square dance at the high school on Saturday night. You and Mrs. Dorfer are more than welcome to attend.”
Harve chuckled. “I reckon we got other plans. So if I give you two deputies on Saturday morning, you’ll go over to Hazzard today and listen to them moan about their illicitly appropriated begonias?”
“Begonias?”
“Out on the front porch in glazed ceramic pots. A real fine display, or so they claim. They had a yard sale over the weekend, so don’t bother with tire prints. What time do you need Les and Willard on Saturday, and how heavily armed do they need to be? Should they be packing muskets?”
“When someone like Navidaddy Buchanon rumbles up in his truck on the way to Starley City to buy layer grit at the co-op like he’s done every Saturday morning for thirty years—well, it’s hard to say. You have any cannons in the back room?”
“I’ll get LaBelle to take a look. Let me warn you about something, Arly. When she heard about this, she figured she could show up and be an extra. She’s taken to wearing her hair just like that madam in Gone With the Wind.”
I gulped. “LaBelle heard about this?”
Harve was obviously enjoying himself. “She said she heard about it from her brother-in-law, who hangs out at the Dewdrop Inn. The good ol’ boys are a mite riled about Yankees showing up again after all these years. Seems the sentiment on their bumpers is ‘Fergit, Hell!’ It also seems to be the only thing anyone’s talking about at the bowling alley, the body shops, and the tattoo parlors. You want to reconsider how many deputies you’ll need?”
I was about to suggest a cavalry unit when the door opened and in marched an emaciated Confederate soldier in a threadbare, filthy uniform. His greasy hair dangled to his shoulders, and the ends of his mustache hung well below his unshaven chin. Although he was far from puffy, his pallor resembled that of the floaters in the reservoir. “I’ll call you back, Harve,” I said, then hung up and gave my visitor a wary look. “Can I help you?”
“Private Jeb Stewart,” he said with a crisp salute.
“I’m not General Grant.”
He saluted again. “I can see that, ma’am.”
“At ease, Private Stewart,” I said, hoping neither of us was in the midst of a psychotic episode. “Why don’t you sit down over there?”
“I’ll stand, if you don’t mind.”
“Well, I do mind, so sit down. Would you like a cup of coffee?”
He pulled off a bulging haversack and dropped it on the floor. His only weapon that I could see was a battered musket that appeared to be of authentic origin (and therefore perhaps not in working order). “I could use coffee. I’ve been driving since three o’clock this morning.”
I went into the back room and poured a mug, then took it back to him. The redolence surrounding him reminded me of Raz Buchanon—a combination of stale urine and swamp gas. He was decades younger than Raz, though, and his dark eyes were disturbingly bright. “I assume soldiers stumbling off the battlefield drink their coffee black,” I said. “I’d offer you a bagel, but we’re fifteen hundred miles from a really decent New York deli, and besides that, the local supermarket doesn’t sell cream cheese.”
“This is fine, ma’am. I appreciate it.”
“So why are you here, Private Stewart?” I asked as I retreated behind my desk. “Your comrades aren’t expected until Thursday.”
He slurped the coffee, managing to dunk both ends of his mustache in the process, then looked up at me. “That unit that came up from Little Rock back in ’63, they hadn’t had a decent meal or a night’s sleep for most of a week. Their worst enemies weren’t Yanks, but hunger and dysentery. I aim to feel their pain come Saturday morning. Think how bumfuzzled those farm boys must have been. Here they’d been recruited by a bushy-tailed officer in a crisp gray uniform with polished boots and shiny brass buttons, telling them how they’d save the South and all its traditions. The next thing they knew, they were huddled in leaky tents, gnawing on hardtack, wearing rags, praying the sores on their feet didn’t fester.” He bent over and yanked off one of his boots. “This is what they ended up with, not medals and parades.”
It took a moment for me to regain control of my stomach. “Yes, Private Stewart, I see your point. Would you like to be taken to a doctor in Farberville?”
“Damn field doctors, all they do is amputate. I’m not here to pretend, ma’am. I intend to experience this skirmish just as the original troops did. I stopped by as a courtesy to let you know I’ll be camping on the far side of the bridge for a few days. As long as nobody bothers me, we’ll get along fine.”
“Did you just arrive in town?”
Jeb Stewart, CSA, dropped the boot and stared at me. “Yes, ma’am. Do you have reason to think I didn’t?”
I shook my head, although I wasn’t sure. “A local claims to have seen a soldier up on Cotter’s Ridge on Saturday night.”
“Was the report credible? Was the description sufficient to suggest someone dressed as a Confederate? Were there any details?”
“I’m not sure what he saw, Private Stewart. You’re welcome to camp in the woods alongside Boone Creek, but I can’t promise you’ll be left alone. You may have participated in this sort of thing for years. It’s a first for Maggody, however, and I won’t offer any assurance that you won’t find teenagers peeking in your tent tonight. A kind lady from the Missionary Society may bring you fresh cinnamon rolls tomorrow morning and sweetly ask if you happen to know where the gold is hidden.”
“Gold?”
“Give me a break.” I rocked back so hard that I thumped my head against the wall. “I’m having a tough time believing you came here three days early so you could sit on the bank of the creek and watch your blisters ooze. Despite appearances, we’re not all brain-dead in Maggody.”
“That remains to be seen. Now, ma’am, with your permission, I’ll go set up my campsite. I thank you kindly for the coffee and the warning.” He touched the brim of his cap, then scooped up his haversack and boot and limped out of the PD.
I felt a pang of remorse for my failure to pay any attention to Larry Joe’s purported sighting of a ghostly Confederate soldier, in that I felt as though I’d just encountered one. I was still considering it all when the telephone rang.
“Stonewall Jackson here,” I said cheerfully.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Mrs. Jim Bob. “I want you to go check on Lottie Estes. She didn’t show up at the high school today, and I find this worrisome. Lottie is highly responsible, unlike others in the community who fail to abide by their contractual duties to protect the citizenry. Go up to her house, and if she has the flu, see if she needs anything. I don’t know how I’m expected to get through the week without a liaison to coordinate with the impressionists.”
“I don’t make house calls.”
“I will expect to hear from you in half an hour,” she said, then hung up.
I really hadn’t expected the madness to kick in until Thursday or even Friday, but it was obvious I’d been overly optimistic. I decided to stop by Ruby Bee’s for lunch, then drive over to Lottie Estes’s house and listen to her whimper about her stuffy nose and watery eyes. After that, purloined begonias.
Bonnie and Clyde rarely stopped in Stump County.
Ruby Bee was glowering as I came across the dance floor and perched on a stool. “I wasn’t expecting you,” she said, her nostrils quivering as if I’d brought Jeb Stewart’s stench with me. “You want the blue plate special or not? I don’t have time to fix something special just because you decide to waltz in like a prom queen and expect me to drop everything and—”
“Whatever’s easy,” I said.
“Nothing’s easy! That man from Springfield called to say he’s decided to come this afternoon, which means I’ll have to air two units for him and his assistant. What’s more, some man from St. Louis called and said he’d be coming today to stay until Thursday, when he’s gonna camp out with the Yankees. Here I am, supposed to be cooking and bartending, but—”
“I’ll clean a couple of the units.”
“You most certainly will not! If you so much as set foot out back, you can count on eating burritos from the Dairee Dee-Lishus for a month of Sundays. The only way you can help is to go on about your business and let me sort it out.”
I slid off the stool. “No problem. Will you be needing me later to drive you to a psychiatric facility where you can pound your head against a padded wall?”
Her expression softened for a moment. “I’m just kinda antsy right now. Come by later this afternoon and have a beer with that man of yours.”
“He’s far from mine,” I said drily. “Did he say why he’s coming early?”