“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Bailey said honestly, and she was glad that she wasn’t asking about whatever it was that made Opal look like that. On the other hand, she couldn’t resist asking, “What’s the Golden Six?”
“Calburn’s claim to fame, that’s what,” Opal said, then told Carla to hush up when her daughter snorted in derision.
“Now tell me more about your husband that died,” Opal said as she picked up an even smaller roller and pulled Bailey’s hair so tightly around it that her eyes began to water.
It was while Bailey was under the hair dryer that Carla walked past her and dropped a folded piece of paper on top of her magazine. Without thinking, Bailey hid the note and later slipped it into her pants pocket.
So now, Bailey removed the paper and looked at it. “Violet Honeycutt knows all about Calburn” was written on the paper. “Yellow house at the end of Red River Road.” Below that was a little map, showing that Red River Road was very near where she was now.
Bailey gave her hair another brush, then went back to her car, smiling. For all that Carla’s manner and looks were off-putting, Bailey rather liked the girl.
Using the little map, it was easy to find Red River Road. At the end of it was a pretty little farmhouse that had long ago been painted yellow, with dark brown trim around the windows. Huge willow trees almost hid the house from the road. As Bailey pulled into the driveway and saw the porch with the old rocking chairs on it, she couldn’t suppress the thought: Why didn’t you leave me a place like this one, Jimmie?
She stepped up on the porch and knocked on the door, but no one answered. “Hello?” she called, but still there was no answer. When she left the porch and walked toward the back of the house, she saw a woman bending over a patch of vegetable garden. It looked as though she was setting out tomato seedlings. She was a large woman, wearing a huge, flower-printed sundress that had been washed many times. Her bare feet were in rubber thongs, and a big straw hat with half the brim torn away was perched on her head. Bailey could see only part of her face, but she looked to be in her fifties.
“Hello,” Bailey said and the woman turned to look at her. She had a face lined by years of sun, and if Bailey didn’t miss her guess, a few drugs and quite a bit of booze. The phrase old hippie came to her mind.
“Aren’t you just perfect?” the woman said, straightening up as she looked Bailey up and down. “You look like something off the page of a catalog.”
Maybe Bailey should have taken offense at the woman’s words, but just a few months ago, no one would have ever said she looked like a catalog model. “That’s me,” she said as she held out her arms and slowly turned around. “I’m an Orvis-Norm Thompson-Land’s End special.”
The woman laughed, showing that she had a couple of teeth missing on the bottom. “So what can I do you for?” she asked.
But Bailey didn’t answer her question; her eyes were on the plants that the woman had just set into the ground. They weren’t tomatoes; they were marijuana. “Isn’t that illegal?” she asked softly.
“Only if you’re selfish. I share what I grow with the deputy sheriff who looks after Calburn, so he says I have a real nice garden.” She squinted her eyes at Bailey. “You want to come inside and tell me what you came all the way out here for?”
Bailey had to smile at that. She was used to spending the weekend in places you had to fly to. But it seemed that Red River Road was considered “all the way out here.”
She followed the woman onto the screened-in back porch of the house, where there was a washing machine that had to be from the 1940s, plus a couple of well-used washboards. In the corner was a stack of broken wooden lawn furniture that should have been used for firewood, except that Bailey was sure she’d seen some just like it in a shop in Paris. Retro was all the rage there.
They entered the kitchen, and Bailey could tell it hadn’t been changed in thirty years. The linoleum on the floor was worn through in places, and the cabinets were aged with grease and old paint. Along one wall was an old enamel range with an oven big enough to roast half an ox. Under the window stood an enamel sink: one enormous bowl, wide drain boards on each side, and an enameled backsplash with two faucets in it. It was an original version of the sink she’d bought for her farmhouse.
“Awful old place, ain’t it?” the woman said as she settled her bulk into a chair, her back to the sink. Bailey had seen the exact same chairs for sale in exclusive Americana shops.
“No,” she said honestly. “It’s the real version of what the rest of us try to copy.”
The woman chuckled. “You look pretty slick, but I’m beginnin’ to like you anyway. Come and sit down and ask me what you want to. Unless you’d rather can tomatoes.” She said this last as though it were the greatest joke she’d ever heard in her life. That someone who looked as citified as Bailey did could put up tomatoes seemed like the ultimate joke.
It was Bailey’s turn to give a smug little smile. When she looked into the sink, she saw that it was full of homegrown, still-warm-from-the-sun tomatoes. Some of them had holes in them because, obviously, the woman hadn’t bothered with the slugs, but Bailey knew she could save the fruit. Without looking at the woman seated at the table, Bailey opened a door beside the screened back door, guessing that it was a big pantry such as nearly all old farmhouses had. It was, and inside were hundreds of old mason and Ball jars waiting to be filled with the summer’s produce. On the floor were a couple of canning kettles and new boxes of sealing lids.
“You talk, I’ll can,” Bailey said as she carried the canners to the sink to fill them. “I want to know why this town has been abandoned, and I want to know why Opal at the hair, uh, beauty shop was ready to shoot me when she thought I was trying to find out something about the Golden Six. What is that, anyway? I haven’t stepped into a union, have I? And I’m Bailey James, by the way. I inherited—”
“The old Hanley place. I know,” the woman said, watching Bailey as she moved about the kitchen as though she’d always worked there. “Your husband died and left the farm to you, and Matt Longacre is moving in with you today. Patsy is thrilled to be getting rid of him. He never stops grousing about what slobs her two boys are. Of course Patsy spoils those boys to death, so Matt probably had reason to complain. I’m Violet Honeycutt.”
“That’s what I was told.” Bailey was moving jars from the pantry to put them into two water-filled kettles to sterilize them. “What I want to know most is anything you can tell me about the farm I was given. Who lived there, that sort of thing. Did the Hanleys have any children?”
“Who are you tryin’ to find?” Violet asked suspiciously.
At that, Bailey sat down on a chair at the table and faced Violet. She knew her meaning was clear: if Violet wanted her tomatoes put up, then she had to answer questions, not ask them.
Violet laughed. “Somebody somewhere taught you to do business, didn’t he?”
Bailey did not move from her seat.
Smiling, Violet opened a little wooden box on the table and withdrew a hand-rolled cigarette. “Mind?”
Bailey just looked at her, waiting for the answers to her questions.
“Okay,” Violet said, leaning back against her chair, lighting her joint, then inhaling deeply and closing her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she said, “The Hanleys used to own the place, but just because they moved away a long time ago don’t mean that their name was ever taken out of people’s minds as the owners of that farm.”
Bailey got up, went to the sink, and picked up an old paring knife that had been sharpened so many times that the blade was curved inward. The original bird’s-beak knife, she thought, thinking of the expensive French knife she used.
“Are you interested in the Hanleys?”
Bailey hesitated in answering. It would be better to reveal as little as possible. “No,” she said. “I’m more interested in the sixties and seventies in Calburn.”
“Ah, then you are interested in the Gol
den Six.”
“I have no idea who or what they are.”
“Six boys, graduated from high school in 1953. They are Calburn’s only claim to fame. But then some jealous little nobody decided to make up stories about them, and everything fell apart.” There was bitterness in Violet’s voice.
Bailey knew that Jimmie hadn’t been born until 1959, so he couldn’t have been one of the so-called Golden Six. “I’m interested in later than that.” She put a black-bottomed aluminum pan full of water on to boil so she could dip the tomatoes in it to peel them.
“In ’sixty-eight, one of the six boys shot his wife, then himself. That about the right date for you?”
There was 1968 again, she thought. But Jimmie was too young then to have been involved in something like that. “I’m really more interested in the people connected to my farm.”
“Truthfully, I don’t know anything about your place, but I know a girl that used to live in Calburn. Hand me that phone, and I’ll see if she’s home. Except that it’s a long-distance call.” She looked at Bailey expectantly.
“I’ll pay for it,” Bailey said as she wiped her hands on a towel and went to get the telephone. It was a black rotary dial telephone that Bailey was tempted to say should be in a museum.
Violet dialed, listened, then said, “Hey, babe! It’s Honeycutt. I got a new resident of wild and woolly Calburn here, and she wants to know the history of the old Hanley place. Didn’t somethin’ happen there? I seem to remember somebody sayin’ somethin’ one time. Give me a call. We’ll be here awhile, as she’s puttin’ up my tomatoes for me.”
She put down the receiver. “She’ll call me back when she gets in, and if there’s anything to know, she’ll know it.”
After that statement, Violet didn’t say anything for so long that Bailey realized that she was planning to sit there and do nothing but smoke her joint while Bailey put up what looked to be about twenty quarts of tomatoes. And if the woman hadn’t called back by the time she’d finished, Bailey was willing to bet that there were green beans and strawberries to be canned as well.
“All right,” Bailey said with a sigh, “tell me about the Golden Six.” She’d grown up in a small town, so she well knew that each and every town had some great tragedy attached to it, and the residents loved to tell the story over and over. Maybe she should be glad that Jimmie hadn’t left her a farm in Fall River, Massachusetts. If he had, she’d never find anyone who could get past Lizzie Borden.
Violet took a long, deep drag on her joint and let it out as slowly as she could. Since she’d obviously had a lot of experience in this, Bailey had time to peel six tomatoes while she was waiting. “It’s hard to believe this now, but years ago, Calburn was a thriving little town. It had a couple of industries, lots of shops, and it even had its own high school. But in 1952 the high school caught on fire, and the top floor burned out. The fire department said the bottom three floors were safe, but the top couldn’t be used. Since the top floor was where the seniors had their classes, the whole class had to be bused off to somewhere else.”
Behind her, Bailey looked at the woman. From the rote, practiced way she was telling this story, Bailey was sure she’d told it hundreds of times.
Violet paused to take another long, slow drag. “This was all way before my time, of course, but I’ve been told that there was a lot a hoopla over where the seniors would be sent. No school within fifty miles wanted all of them, so the kids were divided up and sent to four different schools in the area. But whoever did the dividing did a poor job of it, because of the twenty kids sent to Wells Creek High School, only six of them were boys and the rest girls.”
“The Golden Six,” Bailey said as she walked to the stove and began to remove hot, sterile jars.
“Yeah, the Golden Six.”
Bailey didn’t know if it was memory or the marijuana, but Violet’s eyes had a dreamy, faraway look to them. “They were golden, all right. They were magnificent boys. Less than a month after they got to the high school, they saved the whole student body from being blown up by a bomb.”
“In this area? In the fifties?”
“Honey, don’t let the accents fool you. People here in Virginia love and hate just like the rest of the world—and they always have. Now we just hear about what goes on in the world more. That summer someone had blown up two warehouses near Calburn, so everyone was a bit nervous. Then, one Monday morning, black smoke started pouring through the high school, and the kids and teachers all panicked. It was chaos! Who knows what would have happened if the six boys from Calburn hadn’t stepped in and quietly and calmly ushered everyone to safety? That the bomb turned out to be a dud doesn’t have anything to do with it. Those boys didn’t know that, and neither did anybody else!” There was anger in her voice, as well as defiance, as though she were having to defend what she was saying.
When Violet looked up and saw Bailey staring at her, she said defensively, “You can read any newspaper in Virginia from the next day, and you’ll see the story of those boys. They were heroes. For a while there was talk of their bein’ given a medal by the president, but nothin’ came of it.”
“So why was Opal at the beauty salon so angry?”
“Parlor,” Violet said, smiling. “It’s a beauty parlor. You already look like a foreigner, but you don’t have to sound like one.”
Bailey started packing tomatoes into the sterile jars. Since modern tomatoes have a low acid content, they had to be handled carefully, so she’d have to leave them in the water bath a long time to remove all danger of botulism.
“Opal’s just like the rest of us. She’s mad about T. L. Spangler. Ever hear of her?”
“I don’t think so. Should I have?”
“Unless you’ve been livin’ out of the country for the last five years, yes, you should know her name.”
Bailey didn’t comment on that statement. As a matter of fact, she’d been living all over the world for the last sixteen years.
“Does Congresswoman Theresa Spangler ring any bells?”
“Actually, no.”
“Where have you—” Violet cut herself off. “Okay, no questions about you. But I warn you that the people of Calburn will find out everything, so you might as well confess now.” She left a bit of time for Bailey to speak, but when she was silent, Violet gave a sigh, then continued.
“Congresswoman Spangler is from Wells Creek, Virginia, the next town over, the town where the six boys were sent to school. She was a year behind the graduating class of the Golden Six. Nobody knows what happened—and one heck of a lot a people have asked her—but she got her nose so put out of joint that year that after she graduated from her highfalutin college, she decided to do a hatchet job on the boys. She came back here to Calburn and asked ever’body lots of questions. Ever’body thought she was gonna write a book on how great the boys were, so they told her ever’thing they could remember. But she wasn’t writin’ somethin’ nice; hell, she wasn’t even writin’ the truth. She cut those poor boys to ribbons. She said that ever’thing they ever did was a myth, that they were nobodies and nothing. She even said that she believed that one of the boys had set the bomb in the school so they could fake bein’ heroes.”
For a moment Bailey paused with the tongs in her hand and looked at Violet. This had all happened many years before, yet she seemed to be as angry as though it had happened last week.
“So what happened after the book was published?” Bailey asked.
“Horror, that’s what. Not long after the book came out, one of the boys shot his wife, then himself. His pregnant wife. Another one got on a bus and never came back. And the others were never the same again. It was horrible, what that woman did to them. They’d already had their share of tragedy, I can tell you that.”
Bailey went back to the sink to pick up a tomato while Violet closed her eyes and dragged on her joint. Now is the time, Bailey thought. Her hands were trembling so much that she had to hold on to the sink. Every family seemed to have one
unbreakable taboo, and with her and Jimmie, what she wanted to say now, say out loud, was their biggest secret.
Bailey took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Did you ever know a boy in Calburn, born in the late fifties, who had a cleft lip?” There, she thought. It was out.
Violet didn’t so much as open her eyes. “A harelip? Not that I remember, but then I wasn’t here then. I only moved here in 1970.”
Bailey wanted to kick herself. She’d just revealed her biggest secret needlessly.
“Of course, his lip would have been fixed right after he was born, wouldn’t it?” Violet said. Then, before Bailey could reply, the telephone rang.
Violet nodded that the call was from her friend, then stayed on the telephone for quite a while. There was a great deal of personal talk, with Violet asking how the woman’s children were, and listening for several minutes. When she at last got around to asking about the old Hanley place, Bailey listened as hard as she could, trying to hear what was said, but mostly Violet said, “Yes,” and, “I see.” A couple of times she glanced up at Bailey, who turned back to the tomatoes and pretended she wasn’t listening.
At last Violet came to the end of the conversation, and was about to hang up when she said, “Did you ever know a kid in Calburn who had a harelip? He’d be about your age.”
Bailey held her breath while she listened, but all Violet said was, “ ’Bye, and let me know how Katy’s recital goes.”
Slowly, Violet put down the phone, then leaned back on her chair. Bailey knew the woman was waiting for her to ask what her friend had said, but she would die before she did.
“You’re not gonna like it,” Violet said at last.
“Try me.”
“My friend told me a story I’d never heard before, but as I said, I didn’t grow up here. In fact, my friend didn’t hear of it until she was an adult.” Violet hesitated. “You don’t know how to fry chicken, do you?”
Blackmail, Bailey thought. This woman was blackmailing her in return for information. With a grimace, Bailey went to the old refrigerator—how many years had it been since they stopped making round corners?—and opened it. Inside, the freezer compartment was a solid block of frost; the flimsy door had been forced off long ago. On the shelves below were half a dozen plastic containers filled with fuzzy, gray-green substances; the stench was overpowering. With her breath held, cautiously, Bailey reached inside, grabbed a wet plastic bag that contained something looking vaguely like a chicken, and quickly shut the refrigerator door. Inside the bag was a poorly plucked chicken, head and feet still attached. She was not only going to have to cook it, but also remove the pin feathers, then cut it up. “So, tell me, Violet,” she said without any animosity in her voice, “are you the laziest person on earth, or are there other contenders?”
The Mulberry Tree Page 11