Home Fires (9 page)

I told him about the one pew burning in the middle of the church, well away from the primary fire and he rolled his eyes scornfully. “Amateurs.”

We’d reached the end of the main path. From here, it dwindled into a true hiking trail, one person wide, through a tangle of briars, trumpet vines, birches and wax myrtles.

As we turned to go back, Ed said, “Any of your kinfolks on the volunteer fire department?”

“No,” I said. “Why?”

“I was thinking that if they were, they might have noticed something and mentioned it to you.”

“You kidding? All those guys were noticing last night was how quick they could get water on the fire and how much they could save. They were running on adrenaline,” I said and told him about the way the Turner boy had hoisted that big wooden pulpit as if it were no heavier than a toothpick. “I doubt they were looking for clues first thing.”

“Turner?” asked Ed. “Donny Turner?”

“You know him?”

“I’ve heard of him,” he answered slowly. “Big guy? Never misses a call-out?”

“Big, yes,” I said. “But you’d have to ask somebody else about his dedication. He certainly seemed to have his heart in it last night. Not to mention his back.”

Abruptly changing the subject, Ed said, “You sit in a courtroom every day. See much racially motivated stuff?”

“An occasional barroom brawl.” I answered promptly. “And sometimes a high school scuffle will get out of hand. Or someone will file a civil suit claiming they were either fired or not hired because of race.”

I thought about the people I’d gone to high school with, both white and black. Most of them married now, most of them with children of their own and settled into some sort of nine-to-five job. Most of them decent human beings.

Most of them. Not all.

There are very few of us who don’t have bits and pieces of covert racism embedded in our psyches. Things that pop out when we aren’t expecting it, the “what else can you expect from a [insert ethnic or racist epithet of choice]?” Things we’re usually too ashamed to express, the very things we act superior about when our nearest and dearest do express them.

“We’re probably always going to have rednecks who don’t have anything but their white skins to feel superior about and shiftless blacks who think they’re totally entitled because their ancestors were once slaves. For the most part though, whatever their bedrock feelings may be, I think most people around here try to keep a civil tongue and get on with their own business.”

Ed lit another cigarette as I searched for the right words.

“I guess what I’m saying is that I’ve never felt we were so polarized here in Colleton County that we’d have hate burnings like last night. You’re going to find it was a kid acting out, doing it more for kicks than for hatred. You just wait and see. I’m sure you are.”

I didn’t realize I was getting so vehement till Ed held up his hands in surrender. “Hey, you don’t have to convince me. One thing though: this volunteer fire department. Any blacks on it?”

“You saying you don’t think they came out as fast as they would’ve for a white church?” I snapped.

“Don’t be so touchy. I’m just trying to see the big picture here.”

We came up the steps beside the fenced-in play yard of a church-sponsored daycare center. Under the watchful eye of two white women, little children were swinging, playing in the sandbox, hanging from monkey bars—black kids, white kids, even a couple of kids of Asian descent.

Surely it was going to be different for them?

Burden Drop-Off Center (Matthew 11:28)

—New Testament Baptist Church

Next day, Friday, things were a little quieter. Ed and his people had nothing to say on record, the television cameras and reporters drifted back to Raleigh, the county commissioners were talking about appointing an interracial task force, and Wallace Adderly had been invited (invited himself?) to speak at the interchurch fellowship meeting that was still scheduled for Sunday at Mount Olive.

My calendar was so light that I was finished by two, which suited me just fine. I didn’t want to be anywhere around when A.K. checked into jail at six. Andrew, who actually spent a night or three in the old jail back when he was doggedly climbing Fool’s Hill himself, had sounded stoical when I called last night, but April’s seen too many prison movies. She was terrified that A.K. was going to be raped or beaten up and nothing I said could convince her that things like that didn’t happen in our new jailhouse.

For all I knew, she was probably planning to come along and camp out in Gwen Utley’s office for the whole forty-eight hours. Gwen’s one of our magistrates and her door’s on the same basement hallway as the jail. Gwen’s pretty no-nonsense though, so maybe she could reassure April.

On the way out of town, I stopped past Aunt Zell’s where I’ve lived for the last few years and changed into sneakers, a faded red cotton T-shirt and my favorite pair of cutoffs. A baseball cap and work gloves and I was ready to head out to the farm to see what the builders had done since I last had a chance to look.

My brother Adam out in California had sent me a book with several passive solar house plans and the modest one I’d picked had a concrete slab floor, steel framing, a tiny sunroom and a couple of strategically placed masonry walls to store heat in cold weather. South-facing windows would catch the low winter sun, while the eaves were angled to block most of the higher summer sun. A trellis of wisteria would help shade the south side until the trees got taller, and extra thick insulation would cut down on both heating and cooling costs without adding too much to the overall building cost.

The two solar collectors on the roof and the hot water tank were a bigger investment, but I liked the idea of letting the sun heat my water from March till November.

“And if you’d ante up another ten or fifteen thou, you could go totally off-grid,” Adam says, e-mailing me diagrams and figures about storage batteries, photovoltaics, and Swedish refrigerators. This from a man who enjoys the Silicon Valley lifestyle in a seven-thousand-square-foot house.

“Hey, I use solar energy to heat the pool,” he says indignantly.

It was another hot and sticky day here in eastern North Carolina, but I kept my car windows down and the air conditioner off. If I hoped to do any work on the house, it would seem even hotter to step out of a cool car into ninety-two degrees.

A church sign on the way out of town read

God’s fire in your heart
Will keep you from burning.

Okay.

Churches have always had signs, of course. Usually they’re dignified brick boxes neatly lettered on either side with the name of the pastor and the hours of service. In the last few years though, the brick boxes started having a little glass door on either side and a signboard inside that spells out exhortational messages with changeable letters.

Or else the pastors use one of those portable signs on wheels, the kind that usually have a big red arrow pointing to a used car sale: “All prices slashed!!”

Not all the church messages make good sense—especially when some of the letters fall off and you have to guess at the original wording.

Portland Brewer and I recently saw one where the letters were so scrambled that it looked as if the sign was speaking in tongues.

In front of a Pentecostal church.

True story.

When I got to the King homeplace, I turned in at the long sweeping driveway that led up to the house past newly planted baby azalea bushes that would someday grow into head-high masses of pink and white.

Aunt Zell’s irises had been spectacular at Easter—like stalks of white orchids, six or seven blossoms to the stalk—but they needed dividing again and she’d already given some to every gardener she could think of. Then she remembered that Mrs. Avery’s mother used to have white irises growing in her dooryard, “so I called Grace King Avery and she was thrilled because her brother didn’t care anything about the gardens. Just let them go. I said I’d send her some divisions at first passing and as long as you’re going right by her door…”

As I drove around to the back (no matter how splendid the front door on a country dwelling, few people use it), I was glad that I’d opted for a new house instead of going Grace King Avery’s route. There’s nothing more beautiful than a gracious old farmhouse lovingly restored, but they’re black holes when it comes to time and money. I hate to think how many gallons of paint it took to cover all the turned railings and gingerbread on the front and side porches alone.

Raymond Bagwell was hard at it with a shovel when I rolled to a stop. Stripped to his skinny waist, he was digging up a four-by-twenty length of sunbaked dirt that was probably going to be Mrs. Avery’s restored perennial border.

“Raymond, right?” I asked as I got out of the car.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said warily.

“I’m A.K.’s aunt.”

“The judge?” He paused in his digging and gave my ball cap a skeptical look.

“That’s me. Mrs. Avery here?”

He nodded toward the screen door and got on with his shovel.

A medium-sized white dog came over to greet me. Halfway between a spitz and a sheepdog, with a thumbprint of black hairs on the top of his head, he sniffed at my legs as I unlocked the trunk and lifted out the cardboard carton of iris tubers. Before I could slam the trunk lid, Grace King Avery was there, welcoming me, scolding Raymond for not helping me with the bulky box—“Just set it over there in the shade. And if you could just give them a sprinkle with the hose so they don’t get too dried out? Zell did just dig them today, didn’t she, Deborah? Not too much there, Raymond! I said sprinkle, not soak. Come in, Deborah, I was just thinking about you.”

Useless to say that I was in a hurry. She and the dog were already leading me through the kitchen—“You wouldn’t believe the way my brother let this place go. I had to buy all new appliances”—and into a large and airy room lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases between the tall casement windows. All the woodwork sported a fresh coat of white enamel.

“This is where my father and my grandfather, too, did their accounts,” she said. “That desk has sat in that very spot for over a hundred years.”

The desk was solid and pleasingly crafted but probably built right here in the neighborhood by some nineteenth-century cabinetmaker who was good with his hands. It was not a piece to drive an antique dealer wild with envy unless he could see it with Mrs. Avery’s ancestor-addled eyes, but it did look at home here. The dog curled up in the kneewell and went to sleep.

“My grandmother had her sewing machine over there in the corner,” she said, nodding toward the spot where a large television now sat, “but I’m going to use this room as my den cum library.”

(Mrs. Avery’s probably the only person in Colleton County who could use the word
cum
and not sound pretentious.)

I’d never been inside this house before and I was surprised by its charm. There was an ease to the proportions that made you feel as if you could take a deep breath in comfort here, so I praised the desk and the room even though it was still cluttered with boxes of books and papers waiting to be arranged on the newly painted shelves as soon as they were completely dry.

Looking more than ever like a little gray-feathered guinea hen, Mrs. Avery picked her way through the maze of cardboard boxes and plucked a paper from one of them. “I came across this last night while I was looking for something else. Do you remember it?”

It was a creased sheet of lined paper that had been torn from a spiral-bound notebook and folded into a tight little packet. On one side,
Pass to Portland
. On the other side,
Ask Howard if he wants to take me to K.’s party, okay? D.

The pencilled handwriting was my affected teenage loops and swirls right down to the little smiley face over the i. I felt my cheeks flame with the same embarrassment as when she’d confiscated that note in her classroom a hundred years ago.

Mrs. Avery shook her head at me. “Oh, you were a one all right. Always thinking about the boys. And now here you are a judge and still unmarried. I thought surely—”

“Time has a way of playing tricks,” I said hastily. I crumpled the note, stuck it in my pocket and fished a high school yearbook from the nearest carton. It was from a few years back when one of my brother Robert’s daughters was a freshman. It would be hard to open any one of these yearbooks and not see a Knott face somewhere in its pages.

“Blessed if I know why I haven’t thrown out all these old test papers and record books,” Mrs. Avery said. “Really, the yearbooks should be souvenirs enough, don’t you think? Thirty-five years.”

I was appalled. Thirty-five years of pounding sophomore English into the thick skulls of hormonal teenagers?

“No wonder you’re enjoying this change of pace,” I said.

“I’ve never worked so hard, but it’s such pleasure,” she agreed. “The front parlor and bedrooms are still to do over, but they’ll have to wait until I’ve finished up outside. After all those years in town, it’s so wonderful to be out here on King land where everything I see is beautiful and orderly. Come and let me show you what I’ve done with my mother’s roses. They’re the only thing my brother cared about. Isn’t it funny how men are with roses?”

I would soon have to be thinking about landscaping the grounds around my own house, so I was actually interested as she pointed out rhododendrons and camellias and how the gardenias needed good air circulation so they wouldn’t mildew and if I wanted some of the baby magnolias that had volunteered around the mother tree, I should say now before she had Raymond root them out.

She had planted more azaleas on the slope down to the narrow creek branch that ran between her property and the little dilapidated church just on the other side. Here in the heat of summer, the branch was barely a trickle of clear water.

“A water garden with papyrus and blue flags would be so pretty down there, but—Come back here, Smudge!” she called sharply before her dog could cross the branch and muddy his paws. “My grandfather, Langston King, gave the land for that church, you know, so I can’t help feeling an interest in it. I’ve offered to have Raymond mow their grass and neaten up a little, maybe haul off those old cars, but I’m afraid Mrs. Williams took my offer wrong.”