by Leah Weiss
“This calls for a celebration.” She reaches into a cabinet and brings out a brown bottle I seen before. She whispers, looking over at the bedroom door, “I want my friends to have a taste of Moon Pies and moonshine on their virgin trip South, and this moment seems fitting for the hooch.” She pours the clear liquor in little glasses and hands one to each of us.
I look at Lu to see if she’s gonna drink it. I don’t think she’s ever had a drop pass her lips. It’s gonna knock her on her behind. Her smile is crooked, but she looks determined.
One of the A girls says, “Do that toast of yours, Patricia. The naughty one we love.”
The college girls straighten their backs, lift their chins, and raise their glasses, and we do, too. We wait for Patricia. She looks serious and clears her throat.
“Here’s to the girl in the little red shoes,
She’ll smoke all your cigs and drink all your booze.
She doesn’t have her cherry but that’s not a sin
Cause she still has the box that the cherry came in.”
The lot of them crack up laughing like Patricia said the funniest they ever heard, then they swallow the shine in one gulp, coughing, and gasping and tapping their feet. Lu and me laugh, too, but it’s a pretend laugh, and Lu gulps her shine and gets in such a choking fit, she almost messes up her makeup. That makes the four assholes laugh louder. If I didn’t look so good, I’d a slapped em upside the head.
We go downstairs, out to the portico, and drink tea and eat sweet treats. Lu and me sit taller and straighter on our chairs. Helen is there with Baby Girl, but Helen is so thin and so sad she don’t say a word bout our newfound beauty. Baby Girl is nine months old and grins a lot.
We leave the Hollingston mansion and walk Main Street with a grown-up sway in our step. Our homemade dresses are in Bonwit Teller shopping bags with more dresses from Patricia’s closet. Our hair is piled high, and our lips are painted strawberry pink. Patricia touched up the color before we left. A man on the sidewalk tips his hat. Ladies look us up and down and smile. I see our reflection in the pharmacy window. It’s where we sat on stools at the counter and ate banana splits when Grady became marble champion of the world. When we pass, Ricky Miller comes out. He’s the boy two years older than us who has a powerful crush on Lu she don’t see. The story goes he was the one who set Assassin’s tail on fire, which carried Lu to Trula Freed’s door that first time. I know he did it to get Lu’s attention. When he sees us today, he grabs his heart and falls back against the wall like he’s been shot, like he’s bowled over by our new selves. I get the giggles, but Lu don’t even give him the time a day. She’s hard on him. He’s cute in a country way.
Lu ignores him and says, “What do you think Patricia meant about a cherry in a box?”
“I think she was pulling our leg. Down here, we pick cherries by the bag. And it takes a lotta cherries to make a pie for Aunt Violet to feed her chickens.”
Lu cuts her eyes over at me. “That’s the first time you’ve mentioned that cherry pie day.”
I nod. “She was crazy before, so she couldn’t help it.”
“That’s a good way to look at it, and it’s a shame.” Lu hooks her arm through mine. “But today, we’re beauties without a care in the world.”
Lu’s right. No movie star on earth ever felt more power than we feel in our store-bought dresses. Our skin is dusted with blush, and hairspray keeps our curls in place. I feel different from the fool at the last dance who went off with Frankie Tender. This girl is better than that.
We see Daddy off in a crowd of his friends, smoking, laughing. We catch his eye. He smiles and tips his hat like he does to ladies. He don’t know who we are till we walk up to him and say, “Hey, Daddy.”
Chapter 39
Lucy: Power
Bert and I are the stars of the day. I didn’t know a change on the outside could make such a difference on the inside. We cause a ruckus walking down the sidewalk and up to Daddy’s friends. Ricky Miller follows us from the soda fountain to the warehouse and acts the fool. I ignore him on principle. I ignore all the tobacco doings that afternoon, so aware of the attention Bert and I receive. We’ve crossed some invisible line into the land of beguile, and I feel a power I never knew before.
The camp Germans working inside the warehouse keep looking our way, us standing at the door as exotic as peacocks in a pigeon house. Two soldiers with rifles by their sides watch the POWs in case they get out of line. One soldier says, “Keep your eyes to yourself,” but the Germans smile at us anyway. Maybe they don’t know English. Maybe they do.
I almost forget to pay attention to my favorite part of market: the auctioneers. If it weren’t for them, our tobacco wouldn’t get sold for top dollar. Without auctioneers singing the praises of the brown leaf, the sweat of the field hands would be for less. Then Daddy might not call himself a tobacco farmer, and the family land we’ve owned for three generations might be lost. Daddy says auctioneers are the stars who make all the hard work work.
They wear tailored suits and silk ties and polished shoes. They slick back their hair with pomade. Their voices are mesmerizing. In the dusty cavern of Riverton’s tobacco warehouses every Friday for nearly two months they will drift from basket to basket, pull top bid from the buyer, and give top dollar to the seller. Auctioneers love the limelight, and the limelight loves them.
Today, Daddy’s tobacco gets sold, and the price makes him happy, but he doesn’t say anything about how grown-up Bert and I look. Grady works to cut us down to size.
“How’d you girls get your hair in sausage rolls like that? Pass the mustard. I’m hungry.” And “Where’d your freckles go, Bert?” Grady wouldn’t know high fashion if it bit him in the butt. We hold our heads high.
Then things start to slide downhill.
The walk to Morningside for supper is three sweltering blocks from the warehouse. My scalp and face start to itch from the hairspray and makeup. I sit on a bench packed tight and eat fried oysters while the pads in my armpits soak through. I’m mortified to see sweat pooling at my waist. Bert looks as bad as I feel, and she uses a napkin to wipe her upper lip and across her forehead, but she smears the makeup so her freckles show through. Her lipstick is gone and her curls droop. From the look on Bert’s face, I look as pitiful.
We excuse ourselves, but Daddy and Grady hardly notice. They eat another plate of fried oysters, and we find soap and water at a sink out back. We take turns on lookout and change back into our cool cotton dresses Mama made. The store-bought ones get stuffed in the bag. We pull a hundred bobby pins out of our hair to set it free. When we get back to the table, Daddy’s paying the bill, and Grady grabs the last hushpuppy. They don’t even notice we look like our fourteen-year-old selves again. We walk to the opening market dance held at the high school gymnasium. Bert lags behind.
She says, nervous, “You think he’s inside?”
“Who?”
“Frankie Tender.”
“Why would he be here?”
“This is a dance with a band, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but I think Frankie played with the Top Hats. This band is the Romeos from New Bern. Says so right there.” I point to the poster, and relief floods Bert’s face. We start to walk in when Cousin Patricia and her college friends drift by, parting the crowd with their perfumed demeanor. Men backstep, hitch up pants, tip their hats. Country women with hair in hard buns shoot jealous darts to the pampered beauties. Despite the August humidity that soaks through the stiffest starch, the college girls are flawless. When they see us, they say nothing about our morph back into our adolescent selves. Instead, they hug us like it’s been a month of Sundays since we saw them. Such is the charm of our visiting stars from Cornell University.
Patricia and her A team have barely left Riverton on the train when the prison alarm pierces the quiet shortly after three in the darkest part of night. It wails and w
ails and rouses the town people from their beds with hearts filled with trepidation. Of course, we only hear a modest wail two miles out of town, but we hear the sharp ring of the telephone. Daddy plods out of his bedroom to answer it, and all of us trail on his heels, sleepy-eyed, curious. A phone call before the sun comes up never means good news.
“David, got bad news” is how Uncle Nigel starts. “There’s been killings at the camp. Some of the prisoners are dead, their throats cut clean through, but I don’t know the particulars.”
Every one of us has been witness to Terrell Stucky and his killing gestures, so it is to him that our thoughts fly for this reprehensible crime. We want to know if our Germans are safe. Uncle Nigel tells Daddy to come down to the prison camp, because that’s where everybody who’s anybody is headed.
We stand stunned in our kitchen with questions swirling. Irene says, “Don’t forget Byron—please.” We have tears in our eyes and knots in our bellies thinking about pandemonium at the camp. In the months the POWs have been here, our fear toward the Germans has changed. We’ve learned some are artists, and they hang their work on the prison fence. Some are singers and formed a choir that practices in the evenings. Others plant gardens of herbs and vegetables. Riverton should have been a safe place for them to work on farms and wait out the war.
“Come on, Grady.” Daddy kisses Mama’s temple and promises to call.
It’s close enough to dawn that Mama starts breakfast and chores get done earlier than usual. On the other side of the world, millions of lives have been lost in this god-awful war that drags on, but today’s crime happened in our backyard. At breakfast, Mama bows her head and says the blessing with greater fervor.
I’m doing dishes when the phone rings, and Mama answers, yelling into the mouthpiece, “David?”
“Minnie, it’s Aunt Fanniebelle” is shouted out of the earpiece loud enough for us to hear across the room. “Your David wanted me to call so y’all stop worrying. He said Jim and Rolf and Merwin are fine. They weren’t the ones murdered.”
“You mean Joe, Wolf, and Byron?”
“That’s what I said. Jim and Rolf won’t the two Nazis kilt,” she shouts like we’re standing on the far side of a wide field. “It was two other fellers that was Germans. Heard tell the blood was everywhere. Like slitting open a hog on hog-killing day.” She continues to shout details as if she’s seen it with her own eyes. “They were lying in a pool of blood big as a lake. It’s a wonder a man’s got that much blood in him.”
“Uh-huh. Is David coming on home?”
“Don’t rightly know. He told me to call bout Jim and Rolf.”
“Thank you.”
“That siren was a frightful thing, waking a body out of deep sleep like that.”
“I can imagine.”
“You know my hearing’s not so good, but I heard that blasted siren. Nearly gave Nigel a heart attack jumping up so fast, looking for his glasses so he could hear better.”
“I can imagine,” Mama repeats patiently, rolling her eyes. “Thank you for calling.”
“They finally turned off the siren, and my ears got to ringin and won’t stop. Might have to go see Doc Robertson bout that ringing but don’t think he could help much.”
“Thanks again.” Mama finally hangs up the phone, shaking her head. Talking with Aunt Fanniebelle is risky business. We have to trust that Jim, Rolf, and Merwin are our friends and that they were spared.
Midmorning, Daddy and Grady get back, and Mama makes a fresh pot of coffee. She sets out ham biscuits and says, “We heard Joe and Wolf and Byron are safe.”
Daddy nods. “They’re safe, but two Germans were murdered, and one was that little man they called Ketchup who worked the kitchen.”
Byron had told us about the man dubbed Heinz Ketchup. He was more poet than mercenary, older than most of the prisoners at twenty-nine, an engineer in a former life. He was undersized, and they assigned him to the mess hall instead of farmwork. He washed dishes and peeled potatoes. He got his nickname when he saw Heinz printed on a bottle of that sweet tomato sauce and said, “Das bin ich.” That’s me. He fell in love with the red sauce. He put ketchup on everything—eggs, potatoes, green beans, pickles, chocolate cake, vanilla pudding. We find out today that his real name was Heinz Grout, an educated man learning to cook Southern.
“Sheriff thinks Heinz was killed second. That he went to the latrine and interrupted the first murder. There was no blood tracked back to the tents. All the other prisoners were accounted for. Other than the guard who found the two bodies—who didn’t have any blood on him except what he walked in—everybody was clean.”
“How did the killer get inside?” Bert says.
“There were tracks out back of the latrine to a hole under the fence that wasn’t there yesterday.”
Mama clenches her jaw. We don’t have to say Terrell Stucky’s name, but it hangs in the air like the stink of bad fish. And it’s made Sheriff Cecil’s job easy.
“One more strange thing.” Daddy picks up his third ham biscuit. “When the sun came up this morning, Stucky wasn’t in his lawn chair outside the gate. He never showed up at all.”
Chapter 40
Bert: Sure Thing
Different armed guards are outside the prison camp, and they don’t know Daddy and Grady. The hole in the fence got fixed, but the prisoners are scared cause the crime can’t be undone. This is what Grady tells Lu and me cause he comes and goes as he pleases while we’re stuck on the farm. He says Sheriff Cecil had to give the case to the military police from Camp Butner since the killings took place inside the camp. I bet he’s glad to step away, since the killer is likely Flossie Rose’s brother, Terrell Stucky. Me and Lu think the sheriff and Flossie are sweet on each other.
Grady says it best. “It’s a waste of time if they don’t arrest Terrell Stucky,” he says when we all sit down at supper after a day that started too early. “Everybody knows he did it. He’s been advertising for months.”
Irene brings fresh news. “He’s their number one suspect, and they’d like to question him, but nobody’s seen him since yesterday.”
“What bout Tater and Spud?” I say, passing a bowl of potato salad. “They bound to know where he is. They thicker than gravy.”
“They say they don’t know, and I think they’re too dumb to keep a secret this big.”
“Where could he be?” Mama wonders. “Is he hiding somewhere? In an abandoned building or barn?” Her eyes fly wide, and she whispers, “We better lock the house tonight. And everybody be on the lookout.”
“Don’t let your imagination grow wild,” Daddy says. “Terrell Stucky knows better than to cause more trouble for himself. He’s likely headed for an island in the swamps.”
“He could be close and desperate. Look what he did to those boys in that camp.”
What did Mama say? She’s gone from calling the POWs evil Nazis to prisoners to Germans, and now boys.
Irene says, “Terrell Stucky wasn’t in his lean-to when the soldiers went to arrest him. He wasn’t in Flossie’s little house either. They did find something disturbing where he’s been living. They found a gun.” Irene takes a bite of buttered biscuit, and we wait for her to chew and swallow. “The gun was lying next to a puddle of blood on the floor where Stucky sleeps. Looks like there was a fight there, too, with a chair turned over.”
Daddy asks what we all wonder. “Did somebody shoot Stucky or did he shoot somebody?”
“Can’t tell. According to Byron, nobody’s been to Doc Robertson or the hospital with a gunshot wound. There was no sign of Stucky’s pearl-handled switchblade either. It wasn’t left at the scene of the crime. It wasn’t in Stucky’s lean-to. This situation isn’t as simple as we thought it’d be.”
“And what about the murdered men? What’s going to happen to them?” Mama asks.
“Preacher from First Christian said the two c
ould be buried at the back of their cemetery. Talk around town is that a lot of people are sad and shocked. Even people who don’t like having Germans here one bit.”
Mama says, “A lot more than lives have been lost with these murders.”
The next afternoon after chores, Lu and me ride our bicycles over to Flossie Rose’s place. She says, “Let’s check with Tiny Junior first, then we can ask Weegee for answers.” We want to see where Terrell Stucky lived his last days. It‘s gotta be a hole of a place but a sight better than sitting inside jail rotting for the rest of his days. When we get to the unpainted Rose house, two soldiers with rifles stand at the end of the driveway. I thought they would have left by now since they didn’t find Terrell Stucky.
“This is off-limits,” one soldier says.
“But Flossie and Tiny Junior are our friends,” Lu protests. “We brought cookies to be neighborly.”
The soldier repeats, “This is off-limits,” and he looks at us with a hard face like we’re the enemy. Tiny Junior stands on his porch. He waves and we wave, and Lu holds up the cookie tin so he can see we brought treats. He comes our way. The two soldiers got their backs to him, but when Tiny tries to get around him, he says, “Stay on this property, sir.”
Lu says, “That doesn’t make sense. Are they prisoners in their own house?”
The guards don’t answer.
“Well, we’ll talk to Tiny Junior standing right here in the road. Eating a cookie. You can’t fault that.” Lu opens the tin, and Tiny Junior and me takes one. We made sugar cookies this morning topped with extra real sugar that glitters on top. Our beeswax business spared the sugar most folks don’t have.
The two soldiers cut their eyes to the tin lined with wax paper and layered with golden cookies.
“Y’all want one?” I ask sweet as honey. “They’re real good. We won’t tell.”
The soldiers are in a tight spot, being tempted by cookies but wanting to do the right thing. They look one way then the other down this empty dirt road with drain ditches on each side. They shoulder their rifles and take one. “Thank you,” they say, grinning, looking young as us, licking sugar crumbs off their lips.