Home Fires (5 page)

Aunt Essie had been his best looper when tobacco was still strung on sticks and cured in oil-fired barns. She could take from four handers, hour after hour, when most loopers couldn’t keep up with three. And she did it for sixty cents an hour, same as what the men got for priming the sticky green leaves out in the hot sun.

They say that the morning Mother offered Aunt Essie five dollars a day to come work with her in the house, Aunt Essie handed her string over to Daddy’s sister Ida, threw away her tar-gummy plastic apron, scoured her fingertips raw with a brush to get all the tar out from under her nails and said, “God willing, I’ve done and touched my last leaf of tobacco.”

They say Daddy came storming up to the house and tried to lure her back to the barn for seventy cents—a full ten cents an hour more than the men—and she and Mother just laughed at him.

After that, he tried not to brag on who worked hard “’cause just as sure as I do, Sue’ll hire ’em away from me.”

“’Cept for getting you to quit moonshining, it was the best day’s work
I
ever did,” Mother would say, sharing a quiet glance of mischief with Aunt Essie.

We hung our dishcloths up to dry. Maidie patted my cheek and told me not to be a stranger, then gathered up a second panful of stuffed peppers which she’d cooked for her and Cletus’s supper and went off down the path to their house.

It was only seven-thirty, still plenty of daylight as I walked back through the house, down the wide central hall that separates dining room on the left from back parlor on the right where Mother’s piano sits tuned and ready. She could flat tear up a keyboard. Although I pick a passable guitar, I never learned to play the piano with more than one finger. Happily, a couple of my nieces are good enough to keep up with Daddy’s fiddle and our guitars when the family gets together to play.

My old bedroom upstairs hasn’t changed from when I last lived here. Maidie keeps fresh sheets in the bottom dresser drawer in case I decide to spend the night at the last minute, and I’d changed into a spare pair of jeans before supper. Now I picked up the dress and high-heeled sandals I’d worn in court earlier today, slung my purse over my shoulder and went downstairs.

Daddy was sitting on the porch swing. Blue and Ladybelle lay sprawled nearby. The two hounds are seldom far from his side when he’s outdoors.

“Ain’t leaving now, are you, shug?” he asked.

My Firebird was parked at the foot of the steps, so I put my clothes on the backseat, then went and sat down beside him on the swing.

“I’m in no hurry. Just thought I’d run past and see how my house is coming before it gets too dark to see.”

Daddy wasn’t all that happy that I was building a house of my own even though he hadn’t blinked an eye when I asked him to deed me five acres out by the long pond where I could have a little privacy. He’d never ask, but I knew he wished I’d come back home, move into my old room upstairs, let him look after me as if I were still his precious baby girl.

Never gonna happen.

I haven’t lived at home since I stormed out after Mother died. I took a circuitous route through law school and eventually came back to Colleton County, but not to my father’s house. Instead I moved in with Mother’s sister Ozella. She and Uncle Ash have that big house and no children and we don’t rasp each other’s nerve endings.

Daddy and I get along just fine these days and I figure it’ll stay that way as long as we don’t try to live under the same roof.

“Annie Sue said she was going to start pulling wire this week,” I said. “Want to come along and check it out?”

He resettled his summer straw planter’s hat lower on his silver head. “Well, I was thinking maybe you and me could ride over to the Crocker burying ground first? I’m supposed to get up with Rudy Peacock. See if he can put a wing back on that angel.”

A Bible that’s falling apart
Often belongs to one who isn’t.

—Westwood United Methodist

Summer or winter, riding with Daddy was always an adventure when I was growing up. I never knew if I was going to wind up in a heated discussion about politics under the shade of a chinaberry tree in somebody’s dusty backyard or if I’d be shivering in front of an improvised oil-drum fireplace while my brother Will auctioned off the household effects of someone recently deceased.

The boys love to tell how at least once every summer, usually just before barning time, Daddy’d load them all up in the back of the truck with old quilts and towels to soften the steel truck bed and a large ice chest full of soft drinks and fried chicken and they’d go spend the whole day down at White Lake. “We’d be on the road by first light and not get home till almost midnight, sunburned and wore plumb out.”

There are snapshots of the boys clowning on the clean white sand that forms the bottom and gives the crystal-clear lake its name, but none of me in my little pink-and-white-striped bathing suit.

“That’s ’cause we quit going before you were old enough to come,” says Seth. “Robert was already married to Ina Faye and Frank already joined the Navy.”

“So why’d y’all quit?”

Seth’s five brothers up from me and the one most tolerant of my questions of how things were back then, but he shrugs at this question. “Integration, I reckon.”

“But we always swam together in the creek,” I protest. “With colored kids we knew,” he says doggedly. “Kids from around here.”

“Colored kids who knew their place?” I ask from my smug perch on the sunny side of
Brown vs. Board of Education
. “What was wrong with those strangers? They too uppity?”

Seth shakes his head. “Actually, it was Ben and Jack didn’t know their place. They’d never seen whites dating blacks before and they weren’t bashful with their words when they walked up behind some at the hotdog stand. Ever notice that little scar under Jack’s chin? He got a cut before Daddy could break up the fight. He gave ’em both a licking when we got home and that was the last time he carried us anyplace but the beach to go swimming.”

Even though Daddy was a New Deal Democrat who admired Mrs. Roosevelt’s “spunk” I’ve never been totally sure of his rock-bottom feelings on race, but I was willing to bet that Ben and Jack were punished not so much because they’d made a racist slur but because they’d picked a fight over something that was none of their business.

If he has a credo that he’s tried to pass on to us, it’s Live And Let Live And Don’t Go Sticking Your Nose In Stuff That Ain’t None Of Your Business.

Some of us still keep getting our noses thumped.

Like his house, Daddy’s old pickup doesn’t have air-conditioning. I rested my arm on the open window and the warm June air ballooned the sleeve of my T-shirt and whipped my hair about my face. One sneakered foot was propped on the dash, the other was on the hump between my floorboards and Daddy’s.

He wore his usual scuffed brogans. His khaki work pants and blue work shirt had been washed to faded softness, but his hand was strong on the wheel and there was nothing faded about the cornflower blue of his eyes. His eyes narrowed now as he shook his head again over A.K.’s stupidity.

“I don’t understand how come he’s growed up so wild,” he muttered as we crossed Possum Creek and drove along Old Forty-eight. “Less’n it’s ’cause April’s always made Andrew spare the rod.”

“Probably genetic,” I said, enjoying the rush of heavy humid air against my skin. Long as I don’t have to do stoop labor in it, I don’t really mind our summer weather.

“How you mean?”

“From all I hear, A.K.’s pretty much like Andrew was and he says you came near killing that peach tree down at the barn stripping off switches.”

“Back then, he’d rather get a whipping than do right, that’s for sure,” Daddy admitted.

“And April’s the one got him on the straight and narrow,” I reminded him.

“Well, she ain’t keeping A.K. on it.”

“Can’t fight the genes,” I grinned.

“You throwing off on me again, girl?”

“If the shoe fits.”

“I never tore up things just for the hell of it,” he said mildly. “And for certain I never tore up nothing belonging to somebody else.”

The sliding rear window was open and Ladybelle stuck her head in and gave my ear a lick. Blue had his head over the side, his nose to the wind. In his youth, they say, Daddy collected enough speeding tickets to paper the outhouse before they got indoor plumbing. These days he rattles around ten miles under the limit, and the dogs ambled from one side of the rusty truck bed to the other with no fear of losing their balance.

We turned onto the blacktop that led past Jimmy White’s garage, crossed Forty-eight, then did a dogleg onto another blacktop, and finally wound up on the clay and gravel road that runs along Crocker land.

A narrow dirt lane leads across a field of healthy green cotton plants to where a stand of massive oaks shades a fire-blackened stone chimney. The chimney and a scattering of wild phlox among the weeds at the edge of the field are all that remain of the original Crocker homeplace.

“How’d it burn?” I asked as we bumped our way towards it.

“Chimney fire,” said Daddy. (In his Colleton County accent, it came out “chimbly far,” but I had no trouble understanding him.)

“Forty year ago, it were. Martha’s mama was cooking dinner when it catched and she had to be dragged out. Kept trying to get back in till Dwight’s daddy, Cal Bryant—he was the one got here first—he promised he’d go back in for her milk pitcher if she’d promise to stay in the yard. Funny what folks take a notion to save at a time like that. Whole houseful of nice stuff and the only thing she was worried over was a milk pitcher that maybe cost fifty cent at Woolworth’s.”

“What would you save?” I asked.

“Your mama’s picture,” he said promptly. “The picture albums with you young’uns. Maybe my mama’s Bible if they was time. Everything else, I could replace.”

I knew what he meant even though the house was full of irreplaceable reminders of people long gone: a hand-pegged wardrobe that his grandfather built out of heart pine, his mother’s punched-tin pie safe that stood by the back door, the stack of intricate hand-pieced quilts that had warmed us through childhood’s long winter nights, a zillion bits of glass and china and tatted pillow slips and rush-bottomed chairs and pocket knives that had been sharpened so many times that their blades were worn down to slender steel crescents—each object with a story, some of which only Daddy remembered now.

Hard as it would be to lose those, losing the pictures and the Bible would be like losing our past. Pictures can’t be retaken. And though Daddy’s not much for churchgoing, the Bible holds his mother’s record of the family’s births and deaths and marriages in her semi-literate handwriting.

The lane curved around the oak grove. A dusty old black two-ton truck was parked out in the cotton field near a tall magnolia tree in full bloom. As we approached, I saw that the tree stood inside a low stone wall that enclosed a small plot of ground about twenty-five feet square. The truck was fitted with a hydraulic winch to hoist slabs of marble and granite in and out of the truck’s bed.

“You ever meet Rudy Peacock before?” Daddy asked as a man rose from his seat on the wall.

“Not that I remember,” I said.

“His granddaddy made my daddy’s stone and his daddy and him did Annie Ruth’s and your mama’s stone, too.”

My grandfather Knott’s “stone” was a ten-foot-tall black marble obelisk, erected shortly after he crashed and drowned in Possum Creek. Revenuers shot out his truck tires when he tried to outrun them with a load of his homemade whiskey. From all accounts, my grandfather was a good-hearted family man who turned to moonshining when boll weevils destroyed the cotton farms around here. It was the only way he knew to feed and clothe his extended family and pay the taxes on his little piece of land.

Daddy was barely in his teens when he became the man of the house, and defiant pride had reared that costly shaft to his father’s memory long before my birth. Same with his first wife’s marker, too, of course.

I probably would have met the Peacocks, father and son, when they came out to set Mother’s white marble stone except that I was in full flight by then—mad at Daddy, mad at my brothers, mad at God—so mad that I stayed gone for two years.

“Rudy’s right shy with women,” Daddy warned as we pulled up to the big truck. “Try not to scare him.”

Scare him?

The man now leaning against the truck’s front fender was tall as Daddy, but so broad and muscular you could’ve fit two Kezzie Knotts into one Rudy Peacock’s chinos and black T-shirt. Peacock’s hair was granite gray and his arms were roped with veins that stood out against the muscles. He nodded politely when we were introduced, but he didn’t put out his hand, his eyes didn’t quite meet mine, and he soon moved back so that Daddy was a buffer between us.

Ordinarily, I’d have asked if he was the father of a Peacock girl who’d been a year or two ahead of me in high school, but he was clearly so uncomfortable that I was ready to fade into the background.

Not Daddy, though. He’s always had a broad streak of mischief in him.

“Deb’rah’s gonna need your vote again come election time,” he said. “And won’t some of your girls in school with her? What was their names, shug?”

“Now you didn’t drag Mr. Peacock out here to get his vote or talk about my high school days,” I said, and opened the wide iron gate set in the stone wall.

The damage was apparent as soon as I stepped inside and it shamed and angered me that any nephew of mine had a hand in this. I can understand teenage boys buying beer illegally. I can understand why they’d come back here, well off the road and out of casual view, to drink it in the moonlight and strew the cans around. But to then start pushing over headstones? To come armed with a can of spray paint?

The need to smash and deface I do not understand.

I hadn’t closely scrutinized the Polaroid pictures of the damage that Cyl DeGraffenried had introduced as evidence that afternoon. Mrs. Avery had picked them up, but under her disapproving eye, I had given them only a cursory, embarrassed glance. Now that I was here and could see all the girls’ names printed in dark green across the stones and wall, I realized that A.K. had probably been telling the truth when he swore he hadn’t used the spray can.