Playing by the Rules: A Novel (4 page)

Walking to the front of the house, Nana stood on the enclosed porch overlooking the snow-capped mountains that looked like their peaks had been dipped into Granddaddy’s heavy whipping cream. The porch extended half the length of the house, with windows that gave her breathtaking views of the extraordinary beauty that lay before her. No matter how many times she stood in this position looking in the same direction, she never tired of the glorious
scenery, and with the winter upon them and the dogwoods standing naked, she could see clear through the branches to the rambling mountain vistas. Land that God made that stood the test of time, that she could depend on being there every morning when she awoke, provided her with a sense of safety and security.

Yet she felt there was something slightly unsettling about this day as she stared at the Blue Ridge. The smell of tobacco was unusually heavy in the air, which was strange because the plantations had been long gone and it was winter. When she inhaled more deeply, she also detected a sweet smell trailing the pungent thickness, which was odd because there weren’t any flowers in bloom. But there was no mistaking that the scent that lingered smelled like a combination of cured tobacco leaf and rose.

When Louise opened the door, Medford stood there greeting her with a smile that looked as if it had been painted on with a brush. Behind the grin she could tell he was withholding something, like a secret that was crumpled up on paper and tossed into a dark corner of a closet. As he leaned forward to kiss her, she grazed her lips against his, touching more air than skin.

“Is that all the Merry Christmas I get?” he asked, stepping into her living room.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got your present right here.” Louise picked up a shopping bag filled with gift-wrapped boxes and gestured toward one of the packages.

“That’s not what I mean.”

“It could get merrier later.” She attempted a smile that rivaled his for phoniness. “That all depends on you.” She grabbed her coat from across the arm of the couch.

“I’ve got something I need to tell you,” said Medford.

“Speak,” Louise said as if giving an order.

Medford put his arms around her, giving her the attention she
deserved. “But I can’t tell you now,” he said. “It has to wait until tomorrow. It’s too deep for Christmas conversation.”

“Don’t bother.” Louise pulled away from his embrace. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Louise, what are you talking about?”

Medford looked confused, but Louise didn’t care. “Come on … it’s time to go,” she said as politely as she could. “Nana’s expecting us.”

It was raining on Interstate 64 as Jeremiah Richardson headed west in his 1964 white two-door six-cylinder Dodge Dart 270. Squinting through the windshield, the last thing he needed was for the temperature to drop so the roads would freeze. Those conditions would be disastrous for driving, he thought, and it could get worse if the rain in the mountains turned to snow. It was bad enough the law wasn’t on his side, now he had to contend with the weather being against him as well. With Lemon City almost a hundred miles away, it wasn’t the lack of sleep that was bothering him, it was making sure the same pair of headlights weren’t on his tail for an extended period of time. It wasn’t hunger making the growling noise in his belly either, it was the feeling of not knowing whether or not they’d make it safely to the mountains that was churning his stomach. Driving through the darkness and the pouring rain wasn’t what he had in mind for Christmas Day, and he lit a Winston as if that would help him to see better. He heard some stirring behind him in the backseat, and the next thing
he knew his nine-year-old sister’s head sprang up like a jack-inthe-box.

“After Lemon City, then where are we going?” Ruby Rose asked, waking up from her nap. As the end of her question transitioned into a yawn, she flung one leg over the other and climbed into the front seat. “Why’s it named after lemons anyway? That’s a funny name for a town.”

“A long time ago the people named the town after the color of their skin.”

“Why? Were they yellow?” she posed as if she were afraid to ask the question, having a hard time seeing people’s faces the same color as the crayon she used to fill in the sun in her coloring book.

“They were a mixture of three races, which made most of them light-skinned.”

“Oh,” said Ruby Rose, unsure of how that would occur, but willing to accept it as fact.

“We’re only going to pass through Lemon City,” Jeremiah explained. “That will give us some time for all the attention to blow over so we can throw the cops off our trail. If we stay put somewhere for a while, hopefully some of the heat will die down. Then we can drive north to Massachusetts.” Jeremiah took a hit on his cigarette and blew out the smoke. “I hear that’s where Dick Gregory plans to move.”

“Who’s that?”

“You haven’t heard about Dick Gregory?” He glanced at his sister.

Ruby Rose shook her head.

“He’s that famous comedian and civil rights activist who also ran for president in 1968, who’s now thinking about buying a four-hundred-acre farm in Plymouth, Massachusetts.” Jeremiah
paused to make sure Ruby Rose had absorbed all that information. “I’ve come up with the perfect plan. Check it out.” He took another hit off his cigarette. “With what I know of healing with herbs and crystals combined with Dick Gregory’s knowledge of holistic nutrition, with any luck, maybe I could interest him in a deal and we could go into business together. How’d you like jumpin’ into somethin’ like that?” He looked in the rearview mirror, then returned his eyes to the road. “The other cool thing is Dick served in the Army too. Our paths never crossed in Vietnam, but that’s something we also have in common.” Glancing over his shoulder he could see his sister was sitting quietly, intrigued by the story, expecting to hear more. “I read somewhere in a newspaper that there are five houses on his property. If we play our cards right, maybe we could work something out, and he’d let us live in one of them.”

“Are we gonna become farmers?”

“I guess that’s what you might call us. You’re not afraid of a little hard work and getting up early in the mornings, are you?”

“No.” Ruby Rose wasn’t completely convinced, but she thought it would make Jeremiah happy if she agreed. “Sounds like fun.” Ruby Rose began humming the “Old MacDonald” song. A few minutes later, she interrupted herself. “What are healing herbs and crystals?” She wrinkled her forehead and pulled a string of yarn that was already unraveling on her glove to expose the tip of one of her fingers even more. After finding a pen on the floor, she began to draw a face on her finger to make a puppet person. “How can you heal with rocks?”

“I’ll explain all that to you later.” Jeremiah was wondering how long it would take her to ask that question. “I’m gonna stop the car and pull over on the side of the road in a little while, so we can eat. I’ll show you then.”

Ruby Rose continued humming the “Old MacDonald” song, making her puppet person dance to the tune.

Putting out his cigarette, Jeremiah thought how great it was to finally be reunited with his sister. Driving along Interstate 64 in the pouring rain as the windshield wipers moaned and struggled to clear his view, he started seeing pieces of his family, broken into fragments, and thought about how there was nothing he could have done to put it back together.

Jeremiah and Ruby Rose had never really lived together. They had the same mother, but different fathers. Their mother died four years ago, the same year Jeremiah turned eighteen and got caught in the tail end of the draft and sent to the United States Army and shipped out to Vietnam. He arrived in the jungle just before Cambodia was invaded and the National Guardsmen opened fire, killing four young people at Kent State in Ohio and two at Jackson State in Mississippi. Two years was all he served, because he developed an arrhythmia and temporary hand paralysis that no one could explain, other than by exposure to napalm. But Jeremiah didn’t recall being near that chemical and the cause of his infliction remained undiagnosed. However, receiving this unfortunate news from the doctor in the infirmary wasn’t all bad. After losing over half of the brothers in his infantry, being spared from front-line combat actually gave him back his life. He was assigned to nonactive duty in the pharmacy, where he learned about medicine. But it was the herbs that he researched and experimented with, like the chicory he ate to steady the beating of his heart and the snakeroot tea he drank to shrink the tumor that the doctors finally located against his spine, that provided his cure. Unlike his prescription medicine, which constantly made him vomit, the herbs had no side effects. Ultimately they made his heart grow
stronger and gave him back the use of his hands. When he finished his tour of duty, the Army discharged him shortly after he turned twenty in 1972, the year the B-52s bombed Hanoi and Haiphong, around the same time the President started withdrawing the troops from Vietnam and conversations for a cease-fire and peace talks began. That was when he wound up in Mattoxville, Virginia, outside Portsmouth, and Dr. Handy gave him a job.

It wasn’t purely coincidence that brought him to Mattoxville. After his mother passed away, he called neighbors from his hometown in Livingston, who said that his sister had been taken away by a social worker and transported two hundred miles to Mattoxville. Jeremiah was hoping that Ruby Rose would still be there.

It was a good thing he got a job with Dr. Handy, because it was time well spent. The older man, who appeared to be fiftyish but could have been in his early seventies for all Jeremiah knew, was conservative-looking for his nontraditional and unconventional ways. He was a licensed physician, as well as a self-proclaimed doctor of life who had the amazing ability to fix, cure, and heal with or without prescription medicine. As the proprietor of the drugstore on Old Kings Street and Main, Dr. Handy taught Jeremiah, who already had some knowledge of herbs, to heal with organic materials, such as crystals and precious stones. Between the Army and Dr. Handy, Jeremiah learned a variety of survival skills ranging from living in the wilderness to executing renegade rescue prisoner-of-war missions, from reducing severe arthritis pain to caring for the maimed and critically wounded. One thing he hadn’t learned, however, was how to escape the law and avoid becoming a felon on the FBI Most Wanted List, but he was always up for mastering a new trick and taking on a new challenge.

It was also at Dr. Handy’s where Jeremiah learned about Ruby
Rose. One day a woman was talking so loudly to her friend while he was filling a prescription that he couldn’t help but overhear the conversation. He heard a lady describe how she felt sorry for a young girl about nine years old who was as cute as a button with honey-brown pigtails and tiny polka-dotted freckles who was living with a foster parent who was questionable. According to the woman, the foster parent probably treated that child the way she would kick around a mangy homeless dog if she had one. Not that one had anything to do with the other, she added, but she believed that the way people took care of their pets was an indication of how they provided for their own. Jeremiah knew it was a long shot, but the girl fit the description of what he remembered about his sister and was about the age Ruby Rose would be. When he heard the woman mention Miss Molly Esther Reynolds as the kind of example that gave foster parenting a bad name, he went straight to the telephone book. When he flipped through the pages, almost immediately he found an M. E. Reynolds on Chickahominy Road.

After surveying the house for several months, he didn’t like what he saw, and knew it was only a matter of time before he’d rescue his sister from the prison the state called a home.

“Are we almost there yet?” Ruby Rose squinted her eyes to see through the rain, sliding against the window to identify anything recognizable on the interstate.

“Almost.”

Turning to Jeremiah’s profile, she asked, “What took you so long?” She made her hands climb one over the other as if they were stepping up an invisible ladder, her bare fingers touching through tattered gloves.

“I wish I could have come sooner,” Jeremiah said, keeping his
eyes on the road. “But I had to wait for the right time to get you.” He glanced at Ruby Rose, who turned her head toward the window and wiped her face with her sleeve.

“Trust me, I tried to adopt you legally, but I had just turned eighteen and the courts wouldn’t let me do it without a proper home and decent-paying job with health benefits. Then I went into the Army for two years. When I got out, it took just as much time to realize I wasn’t going to get help from the stupid system to gain legal custody. Confidentiality laws made it impossible for me to get the documents I needed to make a case to become your legal guardian. Then I found out that when Mama knew she was sick, she signed papers that released you to state authorities, which meant I no longer had any legal rights to claim you as my sister. With Mama dead and the fact that we have different fathers, we might as well have been total strangers in the eyes of the law. The fact that we were once a family had been taken away by the state, and I’m just as likely as any real kidnapper to go to jail because taking you from Miss Molly Esther Reynolds is considered a crime. Yet I had no choice but to steal you away.” He glanced at his sister, who wiped her face again with the back of her sleeve. “And now you’re stolen state property, and I’m stuck with you.” Jeremiah chuckled, hoping to make his sister smile, but she wasn’t in the mood. “We’ll have to stay undercover for a while,” Jeremiah said seriously. “But it’s worth it, since the only people we have in this world are each other.”