Trey winced. How had their father been able to withstand Max’s frank, cutting gaze and still say the words
lady farmer
aloud? “Both, I guess.”
Kelly’s look was somewhere between pity and disgust. “I’m sorry it took Dad’s passing to get you to come back to the farm.”
CHAPTER THREE
T
REY
WAS
ASLEEP
when the first knock came on the front door. He pulled on some pants and a sweater then stumbled down the stairs to see who was there. Whoever it was hadn’t stopped knocking for even a second. His aunt Lois stood on the front porch, a dish balanced on her left arm as she knocked with her right fist. He didn’t even have a chance to wish her a good morning before she sailed past him into the house and wove her way to the kitchen.
He thought about stopping her, but no man had stopped Lois Harris since the day she was born a Mangum over fifty years ago, and he was unlikely to be the first. When he caught up to her, she was standing in front of the open fridge, shuffling take-out containers of barbecue around.
“I expected it of you,” she said into the fridge, “though your brother should’ve known better. Noreen raised y’all both to know better.”
Trey wasn’t entirely certain what he and Kelly had done—or failed to do.
The brine-only pickle jars Aunt Lois pulled out of the fridge clinked on the metal edge of the old, laminate counter. “Honestly, did Hank think he would break a nail throwin’ out empty bottles?” She pulled other empty jars and bottles out of the fridge, shuffled more stuff around before declaring the fridge as good as it was gonna get and slamming the door. She must have left the beer cans in the fridge because all that was on the counter were empty mustard bottles with a heavy layer of crust around the lip.
“Aunt Lois, what are you doing?”
The counter was now covered in trash from the fridge and his aunt was opening random drawers and pawing around.
“What does it look like I’m doing?” She didn’t even look up when she said it.
Digging through Dad’s stuff,
he thought, though he had the smarts not to say that. When she found a trash bag and the jars crashed into the bag with one big sweep of her arm, Trey had a partial answer. His aunt Lois was going to clean the farmhouse. But why?
“Go out to my car and get the tea I’ve ready-made. People will be coming by for visitation in four hours. If you and Kelly had the sense God gave a mule, you would’ve cleaned this house yesterday.”
No wonder his brother had smirked when he’d said it was Trey’s responsibility to get ready for the visitation, that he had a project to work on and couldn’t take the entire day off.
“Lord in Heaven! Henry William Harris the Third, don’t just stand there. Get!” She made a shooing motion with her entire body. “And get my cleaning supplies while you’re at it.”
Taking a detour up the stairs to put on shoes felt devious after Aunt Lois’s clear instructions, but he needed to take a piss and get something on his feet before going outside. When he returned to the kitchen with a box full of jugs of tea and buckets of cleaning supplies, the hands on his aunt’s hips made it clear he’d dawdled.
“I found your daddy’s supplies, though Lord only knows how old some of this stuff is. Take a bucket and broom and start with the upstairs bedrooms. I’ll work down here.”
“Aunt Lois, I doubt we will have many people show up.” If Trey had been looking for excuses not to come to his father’s funeral, surely everyone else in the county was, too. “And even if we do, no one is going to see the upstairs.”
“We may not have time to give this house the scrubbing it needs, but we can dust shelves, sweep floors and make beds before everyone gets here.” As far as his aunt was concerned, if she didn’t want to hear the words, they hadn’t been said. When he didn’t move, she shoved a broom into his one hand and a bucket into the other. “I’m not your mama or your wife and I won’t do this alone. You either respect Noreen’s memory by making her house tidy for company, or I go home.”
Still feeling as if he were putting lipstick on a pig for a fair no one would come to, Trey plodded upstairs and began cleaning. Out the window of Kelly’s room—which was
dusty and full of crap his brother should have thrown away or taken to his own home years ago—he saw Max load something into her truck and drive off into the fields. Dark clouds bullied away the nice weather of yesterday, but that didn’t seem to be stopping the farmer. He wondered what she was doing and why? More important, he wished he could watch her work and admire the swift, purposeful movements he had seen yesterday translated from shooting Pepsi cans to growing food.
“Trey, hon, are you dawdlin’?” his aunt shouted up a few minutes later. “I’m not cleaning Hank’s bathroom on my own. Get down here.”
He couldn’t blame her. His father’s bathroom had offended his bachelor sensibilities—skirting mighty close to the memories of the bathrooms in his frat house. Knowing what was in store for him didn’t speed up his steps down the stairs.
Aunt Lois obviously had more practice cleaning a house before a funeral than Trey did, a fact evident in the way the wood of the banisters sparkled. He peeked into his dad’s bedroom. Photos of his father and mother with different relatives were nicely displayed on the dressers. His mother’s sick room across the hall looked like any other guest bedroom in an old Piedmont farmhouse. As soon as his mother had gotten too sick to sleep through the night, she’d moved across the hall rather than disturb her husband’s sleep, a gesture Trey would have found touching if there was a possibility his father had ever said, “Don’t worry about me.”
Aunt Lois was attacking the stove when he walked into the kitchen. “Bathroom.” She didn’t even look up.
“Aunt Lois, nobody liked my father and there’s no wife to console. I seriously doubt anyone besides you will be dropping by with casseroles.”
“Trey—” she still didn’t look up from her scrubbing “—I don’t care if you’re five or thirty-five, if you don’t get in that bathroom and start cleaning in thirty seconds, I will take a switch to your behind.”
His aunt had always made good on her threats.
Bathroom.
* * *
T
HE
FIRST
RELATIVE
knocked on the door thirty minutes before Aunt Lois had predicted. “That Gwen Harris,” his aunt muttered, “has had no respect for keeping decent time since she moved to the city.”
Durham, a city of two hundred and fifty thousand souls, was the city Aunt Lois referred to, and downtown Durham was a bare thirteen miles from “downtown” Bahama, despite Aunt Lois’s sniff implying the other side of the world. But Aunt Lois and Uncle Garner had taken their share of Harris farmland and withstood mechanization, buyouts and the bald fact that tobacco causes cancer to keep and expand on a successful tobacco farm. She had no patience with the farmers who gave up their land for pennies to the dollar—even though she and Uncle Garner had profited from their sales—to move into the city. And she also had no respect for a man like Trey’s father, who had clung to his farmland like a virgin to her panties, but had been unwilling or unable to make the land useful.
But, as Cousin Gwen dropping off her rolls being the first of many in a parade of relatives evidenced, blood is thicker than respect. And Aunt Lois had made the house presentable because Hank Harris had been a Harris, even if he’d been a distasteful one.
Kelly slipped in through the kitchen door just after Gwen had said her condolences and left. “I saw her on Roxboro Road driving up here and took my time, just so I’d miss her,” his brother whispered to him. “I’ll see her at the viewing and that will be plenty enough of Cousin Gwen for me.”
Unlike his aunt, Trey didn’t care that Cousin Gwen and her husband had left their farmhouse for a split-level in the city. Hell, having escaped to D.C. as soon as the ink on his college diploma had dried, he wasn’t one to judge. However, Gwen had been a crushing cheek pincher all of his childhood, and hadn’t even stopped when he’d hit puberty. Her kids had been just as awful, though in different ways. The eldest always made sure to include the mention of major life purchases in his Christmas letters. Every year between his accomplishments at work and the achievements of his kids was a description of the new boat/car/RV/lawn mower that the family had just purchased. It had bothered Trey a lot more when he’d been a poor country cousin. Now Trey just thought it was in poor taste and felt for all the pinched country cousins getting that letter every Christmas.
During her short visit, Cousin Gwen had apologized for her children, who had to work and couldn’t make it over. Lucky for him and Kelly, they would be at the viewing. And the funeral. And back here after the funeral to eat all this food.
His whining buzzed about in his head, but he couldn’t seem to swat it away. With each relative, family friend, acquaintance and Southern busybody who walked through the front door of his father’s home bearing casseroles and condolences, the house got smaller and smaller until it pressed in on his temples and made his eyes bulge. Out of respect for his mother, Trey smiled and said thank-you to each salad that had been “Hank’s favorite,” but by the time all the people left, the farmhouse felt small enough he could call it skinny jeans and hang out with the hipsters at the new downtown bars.
“I owe you,” he said to Kelly before walking out the door and leaving him with all the food to put away. “I’ll be back in time to leave for the viewing.” The scolding Aunt Lois would subject him to for leaving was nothing compared to his need to escape the confines of the farmhouse.
Storm clouds that had been threatening all day broke the moment Trey left the cover of the porch. Their punishment for the beautiful weather of yesterday was an icy January rain, but he popped up his collar to protect his neck and trudged on, desperate to be anywhere else. As soon as he reached one of the fields, he knew this was his destination.
It looked like Max had spent the day repairing fences. At the edge of the fields was an eight-foot metal and chicken-wire fence with metal wires running along the top, tied with pink flags. Like Trey, the pink flags were hanging their heads to avoid the pounding rain. He could see where she had been making repairs. Some of the flags were brighter and less downtrodden than their brethren. Some of the wires were more taut, still eager to impress with their ability to stand sentry, and some of the wood less worn. It was a deer fence. He wondered if she ever electrified the top wire. Probably, he decided. Max and her electric-green gaze had a definite look-but-don’t-touch luminescence.
Like some Irish sprite who knew she was on his mind, Max suddenly appeared in the distance with Ashes fast on her heels. While he was soaked through, she had on a complete set of rain gear and was probably dry and cozy underneath it all. It was impossible to tell the drips pouring off Ashes from the raindrops, but Trey was fairly certain he saw a big, sloppy grin on the dog’s face, his tongue lolling out the side of his mouth.
“How was the visitation?” she asked.
“Is the fence electrified?”
She slowly lowered her pale lashes over her eyes, but didn’t comment on his change of subject. “I had hoped to avoid it, but deer have already tested the fence and I don’t want them to think they can do it again.” When she moved, rain slid off her head in sheets, though she seemed not to notice. His father’s lady farmer was tough. “Would you like a tour while you’re out here?”
He looked out over the field that in just a few months would be awash in green. “No, but maybe you could email me a picture.”
“Sure.” Her slicker rustled with her shrug and more water poured off. “But there are also pictures on my website.” The farmer had a website. Of course. Every business had a website, and Max’s Vegetable Patch was as much a business as any other. She probably even had a Twitter account.
“You could come down and see it in the summer, if you’d like. You could stay with Kelly, or at the farmhouse—it has plenty of bedrooms.” She paused and he let his silence continue through the tattoo of the rain. He didn’t really want a conversation, hadn’t even wanted company until she’d come upon him. He didn’t want her to leave, but he didn’t want to talk, either.
“I’ll send you pictures throughout the growing season,” she finally said, filling the vast, dead emptiness of the fields. “Your father loved how the land changed during the growing season.”
“I probably won’t come down and visit.”
“Well, I won’t take it personally.” Her voice carried a smile he couldn’t see in her face. “The land might, though. After all these years, she’s finally producing and you won’t even come and admire her beauty.”
“She
—
”
he rolled the female pronoun Max used around in his mouth, enjoying the feel “—shouldn’t take it personally, either.”
Even though his father was dead, Trey still didn’t want to be near anything the old man had touched. Henry William Harris Jr.’s touch was poisonous and the toxins lingered on the farm like gases too heavy for the wind to blow away. The miasma would outlast the stinky grime of cigarette smoke on the walls and the farmhouse would never really be clean. Not to him.
Max was talking again and Trey only caught the tail end of what she was saying, but he got the gist; Max would tell the land not to take it personally, either. “I have to clean up before the viewing,” she continued. “And you probably have to change clothes now.”
She didn’t wait for a response, just left him in the fields and the rain, without even granting him the protection of Ashes to bark at his bad memories and keep them at bay.
* * *
T
HIS
WASN
’
T
M
AX
’
S
first Southern funeral—she’d been to the funeral of her maternal grandfather over in High Point—so she knew the viewing meant Hank would be cleaned up from his heart attack and subsequent car accident and on display. As much as funerals played a role in the North Carolina gossip chain and anyone with a claim of kin or friendship on the deceased or the survivors’ side was expected to go, this couldn’t be Trey’s first funeral, either. But every time he looked over at the open casket, his eyes closed in a barely concealed grimace. No one should look so attractive while looking for an escape hatch.