Rock of Ages

by Howard Owen

  She is appalled at what has happened, but she feels she has no right to carp if Jenny wanted to give her house and the small piece of land around it to people who are only distantly related to her husband. At least they did something, came around and checked up on her, kept her from dying of loneliness.

  “The deal, in plain English, is this,” the lawyer says. “Jenny Bunce McLaurin agreed in writing that, in exchange for certain considerations by William Blackwell Sr., William Blackwell Jr., and other family members, William Sr. and William Jr. would have all property owned by her and her late husband Harold, upon her death.”

  The “considerations” seem somewhat amorphous to Georgia and Justin—assurance that her bills would be paid should she run out of money, that she would be cared for in her home and not have to go to a rest home, that she would be visited on a regular basis and have groceries brought to her, that she would be taken to the doctor’s office when necessary.

  “Her health had failed right much in the past few years,” William says, seeming to assume that Georgia didn’t know about Jenny’s failing heart and crippling arthritis.

  “But she just signed everything over to you?” Justin asks.

  “Well,” David Sheets says, “no. As I said, she left certain items, family heirlooms I guess, to your mother.”

  There is a dresser taken by Jenny’s mother from the home where Georgia is staying now. A portrait of Jenny and Harold that hangs over the mantelpiece. Photo albums and old letters. Jenny’s old cedar jewelry box and the contents thereof.

  “You can pick that stuff up whenever you want,” William says. “Any time you want to come by, just give us a call.”

  Georgia gets up and stands next to the glass, looking east. She is not surprised, now that she has had a week to think about it. She is sure that Jenny never even really read the words that the lawyer and William Blackwell put in front of her. The way it would have worked, William would have promised her solemnly that he and his family would look after her “from here on out,” that she would never have to go to a rest home, and she would have told him that the house was his when she died. The will—getting it down on paper—would have been William’s idea.

  “Did she have any savings at all when she died?”

  Georgia hears the lawyer clear his throat.

  “Almost nothing. It appears that she was living mostly on her Social Security, and you know that won’t get you far these days. Plus what you sent, of course.”

  “We wrote the checks for her bills the last six months,” William adds, and Georgia thanks him again.

  The meeting is soon over. They shake hands, promise to get together soon, and Georgia and Justin leave.

  “You’re just going to let them take her house?” Justin asks her on the elevator down.

  “Who are we to say otherwise? Were we here when she needed somebody, needed family?”

  “No, Mom. We weren’t here. But it still doesn’t seem right.”

  Georgia says nothing. She agrees with Justin, but she also feels that she has no standing in her old community, especially when it comes to Jenny McLaurin.

  “I don’t know,” she says as she gets into his car. “I don’t know how it came to this.”

  “Well, we need to do something.”

  “What for? It won’t do Jenny any good now, and God knows I don’t deserve anything from her except a kick in the butt.”

  Mother and son are quiet for the first minute of the drive home.

  “I don’t know,” Georgia says at last. “Maybe I’ll ask Kenny.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  October 29

  Kenny Locklear always seems to be on the move.

  His brick rancher, not much different from the one Georgia fled in Montclair, is within eyesight of the old house, but she has seen him only twice in the three weeks she’s been here.

  Georgia used to resentfully pick butterbeans and field peas where his home stands now. The pole-hung grapevine where she plucked and ate fat, reddish-purple scuppernongs is behind it, restored to productivity.

  Kenny Locklear has watched over the McCain home since the day, 11 years ago, when he learned he would inherit 160 acres of Littlejohn McCain’s property, an unexpected godsend for a landless farmer.

  The poetry of it occasionally thrills him even now, with the farm struggling and Teresa and Tommy living with her parents, receiving alimony and child support.

  When they were married, the farm was always a point of friction. Lying in bed, he would tell her she knew she was marrying a farmer. I thought you might get it out of your system, she would respond. You’ve got a college education. You’re a teacher.

  An agriculture teacher, he’d remind her. Those that don’t have land, teach ag.

  You just want to see that damn rock every morning when you get up, she’d say, playing her trump card. They would chew over the same argument, never resolving it before they went to sleep, having it cold for breakfast.

  From his screened porch on the northeast corner of the rancher, he can, indeed, see the Rock of Ages.

  It sits on the edge of his full-acre back yard. (Teresa didn’t like that part of it, either. Why, she asked over and over, do you have to spend three hours every two weeks mowing that damn field? Don’t you work hard enough, between school and this so-called farm?)

  It is larger by far than any other rock nearby. It was rolled there, Kenny and other Lumbee children were told, long ago from far away, perhaps after a famous victory. (Hell, Kenny thinks, that narrows it a little. How many victories have we had? He sometimes scoffs at the old stories, but the more he hears and lives, the more he believes in oral history. It has become a kind of late-blooming faith.)

  When Kenny inherited the land, he, Blue, and Annabelle worked it out so Kenny had a small parcel near the rock, across the farm road from the rest of his inheritance. Within a year, the footings were dug next to the trailer where he was living in the interim. By the time the house was ready, he and Teresa already were engaged.

  Many small pieces of the rock have been chipped off in the last decade. Anyone claiming to be a Lumbee is welcome to come and see it, have someone take his picture next to it, or bring a chisel and take home a small chunk. (Please take only a small piece, the hand-painted sign asks, and most comply.) For all the chipping, the rock seems no smaller.

  He answers the doorbell at 4 this Friday afternoon.

  “Hi, Kenny,” Georgia says. “I brought you some lasagna. It’s vegetarian. I hope that’s OK. It’s really good.”

  “I don’t know, Georgia. I’ve got some moral issues with vegetables. Sometimes, I just plow under the peas and beans because I can’t bear to see anybody eat them.”

  “Yeah, I know. It seems to be a local thing around here. I’ve been in restaurants where I don’t believe they serve vegetables at all.”

  “Are you counting hushpuppies? They’re made from corn meal, you know.”

  “Sure. Why not? And, I think if you cook just about any vegetable around here with about half a pound of pork fat, it eases most people’s consciences.”

  By the time John Kennedy Locklear became a part of her father’s world, Georgia was long gone. Since Littlejohn McCain’s death, they’ve seen each other on her rare visits and talked occasionally over the phone, mostly about the house. The man before her now has skin slightly darker than hers, seasoned by the sun. His black hair is cut to within a quarter-inch of his scalp. He’s showing some gray at 38, mostly in his ’60s retro sideburns. He’s not much taller than Georgia, maybe a couple of inches under 6 feet, and he can’t weigh 150 pounds.

  He is, she’s been told, quite in demand among the single and divorced women of eastern Scots County. He gives off a sense of steadiness and gravity, but his brown eyes always seem to be broadcasting some secret amusement. In the 11 years he has overseen the many rentals, broken leases, and unanticipated repairs, he has always refused to accept anything from Georgia other than the occasional check for a new appliance or a repai
r he could not do himself, of which there have been few.

  “Hell, Georgia,” he told her once when she wanted to pay him for fixing a leaky roof, “your daddy gave me everything I’ve got. A little sweat once in a while is getting off light, in my book.”

  Now, she tells Kenny that she wants to ask him about a few things, and he suggests that they take a walk.

  “Daylight Savings ends Sunday. We might as well take advantage of the sunlight while we’ve got it.”

  “Make hay while the sun shines?”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  The weather has turned warm. Georgia resists calling it Indian Summer. Kenny is comfortable in just a shirt, and she rolls up the sleeves of her light sweater.

  They walk across the long back yard, toward the rock. At each end of the grassy area is a red flag on a pole in the middle of a closely mown circle.

  “My own private course,” Kenny explains. “Pinehurst with sandspurs. This is the even-numbered greens, and that’s the odd-numbered greens.” He points toward the more-distant pole. “The view doesn’t change much, but the price is right.”

  She tells him about Jenny McLaurin’s house, about William Blackwell and David Sheets, about all her misgivings and especially her guilt. She’s been talking for 20 minutes, and they’ve been sitting by the rock for 10, before she finally runs down.

  “Do you think they just ripped Jenny off?” she asks him at last.

  He’s smoking a filtered cigarette and looking across cleared autumn fields toward the Blue Sandhills.

  “I don’t know, Georgia. William Blackwell’s liable to do anything.”

  “Did you hear anything, before she died, about her not being looked after or not being treated right?”

  Kenny exhales smoke and is quiet for a moment.

  “Hell, Georgia. You know people talk. That’s the main sport around here.”

  “About how Jenny had been abandoned by her no-good, shiftless relatives?”

  “No, not like that. No. They just, you know, worried about her.”

  “Well, why didn’t somebody tell me? Why didn’t you? You tell me every time a damn water heater dies or the roof springs a leak.”

  Kenny has a habit of waiting several seconds to answer, and Georgia has to tell herself not to jump in with another question or observation before he’s dealt with the one already on the table. Breathe deep. Count to three.

  “It’s like this,” he says at last. “I think folks figured you knew as much as you wanted to know.”

  “That’s—that’s so unfair,” she sputters. “They just assume I’m a bad person, that I’d abandon my family.”

  Then she is silent. She has wondered for years what people really thought of the woman who let her father shift for himself long after he should have had some daily attention from someone, who let him go off into the woods on the hottest day of the year, daring the monkey. She never had the guts to ask, but she thinks she knows, now that she has made herself face the truth. Georgia McCain, they’ve been telling each other, wouldn’t lift a finger to save her own father. Why would she care about a cousin?

  “You’re not a bad person, Georgia,” Kenny says to break her silence. “They just do things different down here. If I didn’t have an older brother who never left home taking care of my mother, she’d probably be living here with me. It’s not wrong or right, just expected.”

  “Wouldn’t that drive you crazy? I mean, you’ve got a pretty active social life, I’m told.”

  He gives her a sharp look. “Who told you that? No, it wouldn’t drive me crazy, because I wouldn’t let it. It’s just something you have to do, like breathing or eating. Sometimes you don’t get what you want, you know? If the doctor tells you you’ve got cancer, it doesn’t do much good to throw a fit about it, you just deal with it, you live or you die.

  “Not,” he says quickly, “that having my mother move in here would be like getting cancer.”

  “Perish the thought.”

  The air is getting cooler, and Georgia pulls her sleeves back down.

  “One other thing. Jenny seemed to have a million friends. I mean, the church was packed at her funeral. Why couldn’t some of them, even if they didn’t want to tell me about it, have helped her? Taken her to the doctor’s, or picked up her groceries, just visited more often?”

  “Did you see how old those ladies are? Most of them are older than her. I guess, though, that there’s more to it than that. Around here, there are things friends do, and things family does. It would have been almost an insult to step in like that. And, the Blackwells were related to Harold. Maybe most people thought she was being looked after.”

  “And how about you? What did you think?”

  Kenny throws a cigarette butt down and squashes it under his boot heel.

  “That’s a tough one, Georgia. The Blackwells aren’t famous for their charity around here. I didn’t know about the will. But I wondered. I still wonder.”

  “I just wish you, or somebody, had called.”

  Eventually, they start back.

  “If somebody had called, Georgia,” Kenny asks her, stopping after a few steps, “what would have been your reaction? Would you have been put out? Irritated?”

  Georgia knows she probably would have been both. She has trouble hiding her immediate reaction to unpleasant news; it is a failing she supposes she will never overcome.

  “Maybe. But I’d still have done the right thing.”

  “Well, people—or at least, most of the ones I know—don’t want to be beholden. They don’t want to think that they’re begging somebody for something they don’t want to willingly give.”

  “So, if they thought I didn’t want to do anything about Jenny, they would just not call me at all.”

  “They might.”

  “But that just hurts Jenny. I could’ve done something.”

  She remembers another phone call, one she got less than three months before her father died. It was from Jenny, who was still healthy, still delivering meals and paying visits to shut-ins all over the eastern half of the county. She saw Littlejohn, her uncle, at least once a week.

  This call had come at a particularly bad time. Georgia was packing for a trip to Europe. Justin was 15 and was behaving badly because she and her boyfriend weren’t taking him. And here was Cousin Jenny telling her, in that flat, irritating country accent that Georgia had tried all her life to escape, that they needed to do something about her father.

  “He forgets things sometimes,” Jenny said. “Important things. I’m afraid he’s going to hurt himself.”

  Georgia told her that she had already bought non-refundable plane tickets and was going to be out of the country for the next couple of weeks, that she would call her father and go see him when she got back.

  Georgia tried to assure Jenny and herself that Littlejohn McCain would never let strangers look after him.

  “I’m not talking about strangers,” Jenny said, and there was long silence. Finally, Georgia lied. She told her cousin that she had a meeting to go to in 30 minutes and had to get dressed.

  They are already at the steps to Kenny Locklear’s back porch when Georgia remembers her sunglasses. She had them on against the afternoon glare, then laid them down on a hacked-away flat spot on the Rock of Ages. She has left her regular glasses next door—she’s proud that she still has 20-40 vision and doesn’t really need them, except for driving, movies, television, and a few other things.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve left my shades out there.”

  “Want me to come with you?”

  “No. I know right where they are.”

  “Well,” Kenny says, “come on in when you get back. I’ll fix you a drink. Coke? Beer? Something stronger?”

  She tells him a beer would be nice.

  She’s been gone 10 minutes, and Kenny wonders if she needs help in the fast-dying day. He gets a flashlight and is opening the door to his porch when he sees Georgia coming toward him through the gloom.

&n
bsp; She seems about to walk past the door entirely when he calls to her. She jumps and turns, then corrects her path.

  “What’s the matter?” He shines the light on her face. “Couldn’t you find them?”

  She looks down as if surprised that her hands are empty.

  “No. I know where they are, though. I’ll get them in the morning.”

  “Well, come on in. You look like you could use that beer right now.”

  He insists that she take the best chair in his living room, a recliner that she falls into gratefully.

  He hands her the beer, in a cooler cup, and notices that her hand is shaking. When he turns on the light beside her, she looks pale.

  “What’s the matter?” he asks, moving close and feeling her forehead the way he used to check Tommy’s when he suspected he was running a temperature. Georgia’s skin is cool and clammy.

  Georgia is not a superstitious woman. She wonders how she really can be, in good conscience, since she isn’t even really religious. If I can’t believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, with all those disciples and such witnessing on his behalf, she said to Phil once, how can I believe in poltergeists and hobgoblins?

  She thinks now, though, that ghosts might be the most positive spin she could put on the situation. The logical conclusion, the one she’d rather not consider, is that she is losing her mind.

  Maybe, she thinks, I can believe in just one ghost.

  A mist was starting to rise as she walked briskly back across the yard. The sun had already gone down, and she was admiring the pinks and oranges just above the horizon.

  In Kenny’s back yard, the long-abandoned pea and bean rows have never been completely flattened, giving the land an almost undetectable rise and fall that can trip the unsuspecting. Georgia stumbled as her toe caught the slightly higher ground of one of those phantom rows. When she looked up again, now no more than 100 feet from the rock, he was there.

  Georgia stopped, not daring to move, the way she had acted the time a deer somehow found its way into their Montclair back yard while she was coming out at sundown with thistle for the bird-feeder.