by Jan Karon
“Don’ b’lieve I ever worked at Tate Place.”
Will removed the shoe from his left hand.
It wasn’t Willie.
“You new in Holly Springs?”
“Old and new. Born here, lived here ’til I went away to school. Back for a visit. How about you?”
“Born an’ raised right here. Retired las’ year from maintenance at th’ college, an’ hang aroun’ wit’ Mr. Red doin’ m’ half-sole b’iness. Keeps me out of trouble.”
“I’m retired, myself.”
“I guess yo’ collar do pretty good t’ keep you out of trouble.”
“Trouble don’t dodge a collar,” he said, lapsing into the vernacular. He was loving the soft, slow speech of his youth; it was like poured chocolate. He removed one of his loafers and turned it over. “Just as I thought, Will. Look here.”
“Goin’ down, all right. Specially ’long th’ side there, you mus’ walk a little slew-footed.”
“The heels look all right to you?”
“Look like they can git by a good while yet.”
“Can you do a couple of half-soles while I wait?”
“‘While you wait’ is my slogan. You want taps?”
He hadn’t had taps in decades. “Taps all the way.”
Nearby, one of the hunters mowed through a display of shoelaces.
“I hear y’all are goin’ groundhog huntin’,” he said, standing on the hardwood floor in his sock feet.
“If we ever git out of town. These boys want t’ shop more’n hunt. I’m Merle.”
“Tim Kavanagh.”
“That’s a dog an’ a half you got up front.”
“He is that. You hunt groundhog for sport?”
“Me, I mostly hunt for my neighbor, he has eight kids, but I been known to eat it if it’s cooked right. Clyde, he don’t touch groundhog; he leaves ’em f’r th’ buzzards—it’s got t’ where they know Clyde s’ good, they follow ’is truck. But you take Smokey—he’ll eat what he hunts. His idea of a seven-course meal is a groundhog an’ a six-pack.”
“How in the world would you cook groundhog?”
“Skin it. Quarter it. Flour it. Fry it.”
One of Merle’s buddies appeared with an armload of packaged snacks. “You forgot parboil. Have t’ parboil th’ sucker fo’ ’bout a hour.” He shook his hand. “Smokey Davis.”
“Tim Kavanagh. Pleased to meet you.”
“Okay, here you go,” said Merle. “Quarter it. Parboil it. Flour it. Fry it.”
“Hot oil,” said Smokey.
“Hot,” said Merle.
“’Til brown.”
“What does it taste like?”
“Chicken.”
He’d like to have a nickel for every arcane flesh, including coyote and armadillo, said to taste like chicken.
“Tough?” he asked.
“Not too bad,” said Merle. “Shoot, I lef’ out somethin’.”
“Right,” said Smokey. “You forgot t’ marinate it.”
“What about th’ sweat glan’s?” Clyde walked up with a package of work socks and a pouch of Red Man. “You tell ’im ’bout th’ sweat glan’s?”
Merle heaved a sigh. “Oay, here you go. Th’ whole nine yards. Skin it. Take out th’ sweat glan’s, they’re right about here…” He raised an arm and pointed to the spot. “Quarter it. Marinate it. Parboil it. Flour it. Fry it. Eat it.”
“Got it.” He was sorry he’d asked.
“It’s a job of work.”
“I was just thinking that.”
“Where you from?” asked Smokey.
“Right here.”
Smokey eyed him. “I don’t b’lieve I’ve seen you around.”
“Been gone thirty-eight years plus change.”
“Movin’ back?”
“Can’t do that.”
Smokey shook his hand. “Whatever. Glad to have you. Y’ought t’ try you a bite of groundhog sometime, be good for you.”
He stopped by the register and collected Barnabas.
“We gon’ see you ’fore you leave us again?” asked Red.
“I’ll most likely pop in every day, just to chew the fat. Feels good to be in Booker’s.”
“Bring your dog,” said Red. “He’s a real conversation piece.”
He liked the sound of taps on his heels. Nothing too attention-getting, merely a small reminder that he was alive, he had feet, he was walking down the street on a beautiful day. Definitely worth four bucks.
In the car, he slathered on sunscreen and gave Barnabas fresh water. Then, since he hadn’t met anybody who seemed like they’d hold it against him, he put the top down again.
The heat had abated a little; cruising around the streets beneath the canopy of old trees was by no means disagreeable.
His mother had loved Holly Springs, and hated her forced move to the country as a young bride. Accustomed to the endless round of socializing which was a Holly Springs hallmark, she had struggled to forgive her husband for betraying his promise to buy them a house in town. She had struggled still more to forgive him for spending her own money, without asking, on the purchase of Whitefield.
How had he forgotten how beautiful his hometown was?
He drove along Salem Avenue, wide as a boulevard and lined with houses built by wealthy cotton planters. He remembered the French wallpaper in the enormous hallway of Fant Place, and the parties his mother and father had attended in its double parlor—he’d been invited for tea spiked with rum before he pushed off to college. And Montrose—as a child, he had played in its derelict yard, wondering if the upstairs shutters might fall on his head; now it appeared to be an image from a postcard.
He passed Airliewood, which every Holly Springs schoolchild knew as General Grant’s headquarters in ’62. Grant’s men had stolen the silver doorknobs, shot the pickets off the iron fence, and turned the lead bathtub into bullets—but the old wounds had healed; the house looked better than ever.
His mother had taught him that nearly every house in his hometown was a living history book, including the birthplace of a slave named Ida, he couldn’t recall her last name, who’d become the first civil rights worker.
Wells! There it was. Ida Wells. Facts and names he’d long ago tossed overboard were floating to the surface like so much jetsam.
He pulled to the curb and stared, swallowing hard. His grandmother’s house had undergone an updo to beat the band.
He reached for his dog and buried his fingers in the thick, wiry coat. His mother had been raised here, he’d been born here. There was the very porch railing he’d tried to walk like a tightrope, resulting in a broken arm that was, to this day, not right.
“That’s where I came into the world,” he told Barnabas. “Dr. Jordan was going on ninety, they said, and his hand was steady as a rock.”
Nanny Howard moving through the house in her blue wrapper, which she wore ’til she dressed at four in the afternoon; windows shuttered and curtains drawn against the heat of the day; her Bible lying in the seat of her favorite rocker on the sleeping porch; her daily prayer—
“Sometimes she said it at breakfast, sometimes when we walked out to the garden—‘Lord, make me a blessing to someone today.’”
Barnabas looked square into his eyes.
“She was certainly”—he cleared his throat—“a blessing to me. An island of calm in a stormy sea.”
As a boy, he’d likened her smell to the fragrance of peaches in churned ice cream, and had been mildly disappointed to learn it was Coty face powder from Tyson’s.
His grandfather, Yancey Howard, had been a profound influence, as well. Kindhearted, sanguine, a peacemaker—and a well-loved Baptist preacher who once risked his life to save a boy from drowning in a flooded river. He also enjoyed a type of bucolic fame for bringing twin boys into the world while making house calls to his rural congregation.
Though Grandpa Yancey had the nod of the community along with a sizable parcel of land, Nanny Howard had the money in
their family, just as his own mother, Madelaine, had had a substantial amount in his. He learned that his father wouldn’t accept a dime from Grandpa Kavanagh, though having made a fortune with box factories in Oxford, Jackson, and Memphis, the old man was rich by any standard. That was fine, every tub had to stand on its own bottom, but the fact that his father had used his mother’s money to buy Whitefield was another matter entirely. Long before he was old enough to hear about this duplicity, he felt as if he’d been marked in the womb by something he couldn’t name or understand.
From the time of his eighth birthday until he was twelve, and when no one had money to spare, Nanny Howard had given him three dollars every three months. Both his mother and father had questioned this stream of funds in war and postwar time. ‘If a boy has no money to handle,’ Nanny had said, ‘how will he learn to handle money?’
In return for the quarterly bonanza, she expected to hear of many sacrifices made and much good done, and he’d been able to deliver—most of the time. He occasionally concealed a nickel or a dime spent shamefully, but came to relish using this treasury toward ends other than his own. Giving, he learned early on, produced as much, and sometimes more, pleasure than a Sugar Daddy, with which he’d unintentionally yanked a bad tooth clean out of his head…
‘Twenty-five cents for funny books.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
Nanny Howard pored over his record-keeping, written with a No. 2 pencil on lined notebook paper.
‘Fifty cents for socks and chewing gum for Sergeant Silverman.’
‘Yes, ma’am. I put ’em in th’ Care package Mama sent.’
She nodded. ‘Very good. Fifty cents for shoelaces and a comb. For Sergeant Silverman, I take it.’
“No, ma’am. For Peggy. It was her birthday.’
‘Very thoughtful. Thirty cents for the collection plate, for the work of the Lord in foreign lands. “The Lord loveth a cheerful…”’ She turned and looked at him.
‘“Giver!”’ he said. ‘Second Corinthians, chapter nine, verse seven.’
‘Well done. Eighteen cents for postcards.’
‘For Lieutenant Krepp to write home on. We sent him a USO package, an’ he sent me a picture of him an’ his buddies in Italy. He has two kids.’
‘I hope you sent him one of the courthouse.’
‘Yes, ma’am. With th’ cotton wagons.’
‘I don’t see one red cent saved back.’
‘You don’t give me enough t’ save somethin’ back.’
‘Well, now, listen to that. If I hadn’t saved back, there would be nothing to give you at all. If you have only a nickel, you can save back a penny.’
He didn’t like to disappoint Nanny Howard. He would do it, then. Somehow.
With a dollar and twenty-seven cents yet to be accounted, he sat through the rest of the rigmarole stiff as a board. Though worried about his decisions, he was sure of his arithmetic. At the end, she was pleased.
‘You are a special boy,’ she said. ‘Your grandfather will be proud.’ Then she talked about character, as if he weren’t there and could listen only if he wanted to. ‘“Character,” Mr. Dwight Moody once said, “is what you are in the dark.”’
There was the rub, he thought—trying to be good in the dark…
“Back then, there were lots of squirrels,” he told his dog.
Perhaps he’d stop again and ask if he could see the house.
He drove aimlessly for a while, looking, remembering, and turned onto Gholson Avenue.
He would never forget the night at Tate Place; the memory would plague him ’til the end of his days, unless…
His father’s laughter rose loudly above the distant murmur of voices along the gallery. He was always uneasy when his father laughed; he felt jealous that the laughter was never for him, and embarrassed that it stood out so sharply in a crowd.
He sat in the corner on a stool, watching the commotion in the steaming summer kitchen. Two cooks worked at the stove, frying chicken in huge skillets; a tall colored man named Mose handed off platters of food to a lineup of barefoot helpers outside the kitchen door. Grease popped; someone swore; yeast rolls were bundled into starched white napkins and chucked into baskets. The screen door slapped shut and was kicked open again as loaded trays and platters moved out the door and across the green lawn to the gallery.
‘Y’all git across t’ th’ dinin’ room, now, an’ mind you don’ spill nothin’, you hear? Step along, I’s comin’ right behin’ wit’ yo’ supper.’
He and a barefooted colored boy were pushed from the kitchen by a mammy in an apron.
‘Willie!’ somebody shouted after them. ‘Make that chile eat, then y’all set on th’ front porch ’til I come git you. Thass yo’ job, an’ I ’spec’ you t’ do it nice.’
They were herded across the lawn and up the steps of the house and along the hall to the small table with four chairs in the corner of Miz Lula’s dining room. He’d had Sunday supper here at Easter, but there had been other children then. He had found seven dyed eggs in a grove of azalea bushes.
The mammy set the plate on the table and thumped down a knife, a fork, and a bowl of cobbler. ‘You th’ onliest chile at this party. Willie gon’ see you eats a good supper, an’ mind you ’til yo’ folks gits done. You drinkin’ milk?’
It couldn’t hurt to ask. ‘Can I please have a Co-Cola?’
‘Willie, go wit’ me an’ bring this baby a Co-Cola. He th’ onliest chile at th’ party an’ need a treat.’
He was furious at what she had just called him, but looked steadily into his plate, unseeing.
‘Use yo’ napkin!’ she said, loud enough to wake the dead. He thought she looked ten feet tall.
He tucked a corner of his napkin into his starched shirt collar. He hated his stiff collar and he hated this place.
‘Thass a nice baby,’ she said, leaving the room with Willie.
He burned with humiliation. He didn’t want a colored boy to hear him called baby. Never, ever again would he come to Miz Lula’s, no matter how much people got down on their knees and begged him.
Willie returned with the Co-Cola and set the opened bottle on the table. ‘What yo’ name?’
Timothy sounded like a baby’s name. ‘Tim!’ he said.
‘How ol’ you is?’
‘Five goin’ on six.’
‘I’s ten.’
There was a long silence. He looked at his plate, finally seeing what was on it. Fried chicken. Yes. Squash. No. Tomatoes. No. Green beans. No. In its own small dish was blueberry cobbler with thick cream. Yes. He stared at the way the berry juice had purpled the rim of the white dish.
‘Y’all gon’ eat all ’at?’
‘I ain’t much hungry.’
‘I could sho eat it fo’ you.’
‘Guess I’ll eat th’ chicken. An’ maybe th’ cobbler.’
‘Eat all you want, an’ I’ll clean up th’ res’. But you cain’t tell nobody.’Willie eyed his Co-Cola.
He picked up the drumstick and bit into the hot, savory meat. It was good, it was almost as good as Peggy’s. He guessed he was hungry, after all.
‘Looky here.’Willie held up his left hand; he didn’t have a thumb. ‘I’s holdin’ th’ ol’ hen on th’ stump wit’ this here han’, an’ th’ axe comin’ down in m’ other han’. I done it t’ m’self.’
His stomach felt funny. ‘Did you cry?’
‘Sho nuff I cried. Hit bled all on m’self an’ th’ stump, too. Cat got m’ thumb an’ run off t’ th’ barn wit’ it.’
He put the drumstick down.
‘I wanted that thumb, I coulda showed it aroun’ an’ maybe got a nickel fo’ it. But th’ ol’ cat crawl up under th’ barn an’ I couldn’ git it back nohow.’
‘You can have m’ whole supper,’ he said, pushing his plate away.
Willie grinned.
‘’Cept for m’ Co-Cola.’
‘You has to stan’ lookout while I eats, else I git a whippin’.’
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nbsp; It was exciting to stand at the dining room door and be a lookout for somebody ten years old, even if that person was colored. He was supposed to whistle if he heard footsteps headed this way. His heart pounded, hoping the mammy would come and catch Willie eating his supper, then praying she would not.
They went out to the porch in the gathering dusk and sat on the top step. Boss Tate’s immense touring car was the only vehicle parked in the driveway; guests’ cars were parked up and down Gholson.
The crickets were loud, but not as loud as at his house in the country. He wished Willie could hear his crickets, he would be impressed.
‘Where d’you live at?’
‘Wit’ m’ mama in th’ winter kitchen, she th’ boss cook. I he’ps Miz Lula in th’ garden, she say I’s natural born t’ work a garden. See all ’em flower beds yonder? I weeded ever’ one of ’em m’ ownself.’
It was an unusually warm spell near the end of March; a small breeze carried the scent of viburnum.
‘When Mose cut Miz Lula’s grass, I rakes it. She save up th’ scraps, I carries ’em to th’ chickens. She aks me t’ bring her ol’ shoes, I brings ’em.’
‘You a slave?’
‘What you mean, a slave?’ Willie threw out his chest. ‘I’s a freed man!’
‘You ain’t a man.’
‘I’s a freed boy!’
‘Oh,’ he said.
‘Miz Lula, she nice, I likes doin’ fo’ Miz Lula. Mose say she ain’t hale, she goin’ down. I don’ know what we do wit’out Miz Lula, nossir, I don’…’Willie’s voice trailed off.
‘Miz Lula’s old an’ bent over,’ he said, in case Willie hadn’t noticed.
‘Thass her birthday party goin’ on back yonder. She be ninety-eight.’
The sound of laughter and applause carried from the gallery to the front porch. Then they heard the singing.
‘They be bringin’ in th’ cake now,’ said Willie. ‘You ought t’ seen th’ cake, hit’s big as a washtub. Mr. Boss, he gon’ give what he call a toas’ to ’is mama.’
‘Do we get a piece of cake?’
Willie shook his head. ‘Colored an’ you gits cobbler.’