Bloody Kin (11 page)

Her faded green bikini was on top. As she lifted it up, Sally felt a few grains of California beach sand sift out of the bra onto her fingers, and, for the first time, she was awash with homesickness for curling waves and salty air. Life had been so simple then, she thought wistfully: on her own, sharing an apartment with three other girls from the college, long golden evenings at the beach after a day in classes, meeting Tom there at sunset one day; and falling instantly in love with his shy gentle nature.

Remembering, her hazel eyes grew dreamy as she unpacked, then sharpened into puzzled awareness when her hands touched an unfamiliar object buried at the bottom of the suitcase. It was a small wooden box with a curved lid, about the size and shape of a loaf of bread.

She had never seen it before, but she knew without even lifting the lid that it was James Tyrrell’s missing chest, and the dark fears she had been trying to push away clutched at her heart.

Tucker Sauls tore open the cellophane strip on a fresh pack of menthol cigarettes and struck a match. The smell of sulphur and tobacco made Lacy decide he was ready for another cigarette, too. He patted the large bib pocket of his overalls for his own crumpled pack. He didn’t blame Tucker for switching over after that patch of pneumonia winter before last; but privately, Lacy was proud of the fact that he still smoked a man’s cigarette, straight and unfiltered.

“So when you want to let’s start?” asked Sauls. He leaned against the back of his logging truck, his weather-stained felt hat pushed back on his head.

Lacy squinted through the smoke. “Next week maybe. Let her get used to us coming and going first.”

“What if she notices?”

Lacy snorted contemptuously. “Ain’t no New York City gal gonna notice the difference between a pine tree and a peanut plant and even if she did, I got a right. Jake might of give her the farm, but he sure as hell didn’t mean it for no bastard young’un,” he said angrily.

C
HAPTER
14

Two weeks can make an enormous difference, especially in March, thought Kate as she walked out with Gordon and Mary Pat.

Pears, crab apples, cherries, and flowering Judas were in full bloom now. The plums had already faded and tiny fruits had begun to swell. Apple blossoms were swelling, too, and dogwoods uncurling until they were almost as wide across as a man’s thumbnail, each greenish-yellow petal tipped with a brownish pink “bloodstain” to symbolize the Easter legends.

Quince, spirea, forsythia, and flowering almonds were at their peak and azalea buds were showing a bit of color. Hyacinths, daffodils, and pansies crowded each other in lavish borders. Soon the irises would follow.

Confederate violets had been thick drifts of gray-blue in the orchard where Kate met Gordon and Mary Pat, and the breath-ofspring by the packhouse was covered with fresh green leaves, its scraggly twigs transformed into gracefulness. Lacy’s vegetable garden had neat rows of peas, onions, and mustard, and tiny potatoes were already forming among the roots of rank green plants.

Everything seemed fecund with new life. Bluebirds were squabbling over the nesting boxes Lacy had erected around the farm, mockingbirds staked their territories with long melodic bursts of song, and Jake’s lovesick pointers had deserted the farm to hang around Willy Stewart’s dog pen where two of his bitches were in heat. Kate had even been kept awake last night by the yowl of mating cats.

She didn’t mind. In fact, she welcomed every chirp and yowl. It was part of the natural cycle of life and she felt more and more in harmony with the farm as her own body swelled.

Two weeks had made a difference there, too. No longer could loose shirts and sweaters conceal the definite bulge of her abdomen. Now she wore proper maternity tops and slacks with stretchy stomach panels.

For Kate and Gordon, walking was therapeutic, a painless way to get the exercise their respective doctors recommended, even though Gordon was already more physically active in his newfound life as Gilead’s squire.

Often when Kate walked over to meet him, she found him out on a tractor, overseeing the ditching and draining of a low field, or in conference with the farmer who currently leased the acreage allotments, about contour plowing to control erosion. He had ordered new fruit trees to rejuvenate Gilead’s diseased orchard and planned to convert an idle piece of land into a modest vineyard.

“All the Tyrrells are farmers at heart,” he told Kate. “I really used to envy my cousins. Not their money, but the land. They just took it for granted, while James and I felt like we’d been kicked out of Eden. If my grandfather hadn’t been a younger son, I’d probably be working the family land up in Virginia right now.”

Remembering the flitting, adventure-seeking life Gordon and Elaine had led, Kate was somewhat doubtful.

On the other hand, Elaine had grown up when Gilead was a rundown tobacco farm. As a child, she had risen early and gone to bed late during those hot sweaty summer days, her hands gummed with tobacco tar and her muscles aching from carrying heavy sticks of green leaves from the racks to the barns. Elaine had harbored no sentimental feelings about farming and had left as soon as Philip Carmichael’s money made it possible. Kate thought Gordon might not be quite so romantic about working family land if he’d actually had to do it. Directing the labor of hired help wasn’t quite the same thing.

Still, it was a harmless delusion and did not stop Kate from looking forward to their walks. Gordon was intelligent and informed and a welcome alternative to Lacy’s sour company. Kate valued Miss Emily and Bessie’s sturdy common sense and warm friendliness, and she supposed Rob’s infrequent visits would be more enjoyable once he recovered from Carolina’s poor showing in the NCAA Basketball Tournament; in the meantime, however, Gordon was someone who would talk to her about books and movies and national politics. They had fallen into the habit of meeting after lunch for a long ramble around both farms every two or three days, weather permitting; and they were usually accompanied by Mary Pat and Aunt Susie, who trailed along behind, absorbed in their own interests while the two adults talked.

The walks and the conversation with someone as content as Gordon helped calm Kate’s own mercurial shifts of emotion. He seemed to have made peace with what fate had dealt him and now accepted each day’s offering, while she still swung between black despair over Jake’s death and deep happiness over the prospect of his child. Death and life. Mourning and exhilaration.

Both extremes were tempered by Gordon’s calm steadiness, and by his immersion in the needs of the land. As he planned improvements for Gilead, he opened Kate’s eyes to possible alternatives for the farm. “Tobacco’s not always going to be king here,” he said. “Subsidies are under attack in Congress, import restrictions will probably be loosened, and even die-hard smokers like us, Kate, are cutting back on cigarettes.”

Kate had never paid much attention when Jake and Patricia talked like this; but now, carrying the baby who might someday depend on the farm for a living, she began to realize that land was not inanimate. It was a living entity with certain basic requirements that could not be safely left to renters, who often took and took with the help of chemicals, but who returned nothing organic to the soil. So as they walked, she listened when Gordon talked of cover crops, seasonal rotations, and irrigation ponds; of natural controls instead of pesticides, of windbreaks and new cash crops if tobacco stopped being profitable—asparagus, snow peas, or sunflowers. She was particularly taken with the idea of tall yellow flowers as far as the eye could see.

And she agreed that the old tobacco barns should be pulled down and the solid lumber used elsewhere.

As they passed the barns that day, Gordon gazed at the huge rusting tank that once supplied fuel to the four barns. “Did you know there’s still gas in this thing?” he asked Kate.

“Is there?” She peered at the gauge and saw that it registered three-fourths full. She tapped it. The needle quivered, but remained unchanged. “Maybe it’s broken.”

“Maybe, but if I were you, I’d have someone come out and check it. Perhaps you could get it transferred to your house tank.”

It was too nice a day to worry about economy and practicalities for long and she smiled to see Mary Pat already running across the field with Aunt Susie.

The sky above was bright blue with the puffy clouds of changeable spring weather. It had rained hard several times in the past week and the wind had blown briskly all day yesterday, so the fields were as smooth as a tabletop, and Kate had suggested that they look for arrowheads and pottery fragments.

Long before any Europeans arrived, Colleton County had been inhabited by Indians, and late winter or early spring, before the crops were planted, was the best time to look for relics. Stray points could turn up anywhere, but the likeliest place to look was on the west side of a creek, and Jake had shown Kate an area in the lower field that had been a camp site for several tribes widely separated in time. The earliest and most beautifully detailed points dated back six thousand years; the latest and more crudely shaped were probably mid-1600s.

Mary Pat thought it was as much fun as an Easter egg hunt and she darted back and forth to show Kate and Gordon a chip of white quartz, a flake of apple-green flint or a palm-size scrap of broken pottery. The sandy field was so naturally rock-free that almost every stone was a possible Indian artifact.

“What’s this?” asked Mary Pat, her grubby little hands clasped around a smooth stone the size and shape of an Idaho baking potato.

“Don’t ask me,” said Gordon. “Cousin Kate’s the expert here.” Kate turned it in her hand, remembering the first time she had noticed a white quartz stone burned red around the outside.

“It’s a pot stone. See the color? Like a brick?” she asked Mary Pat, echoing Jake’s long ago explanation. “That means it’s been in a hot fire.”

“Why?”

“Well, you do know that Indians lived outdoors and didn’t have metal pots and pans or electric stoves, don’t you?”

Mary Pat nodded vigorously. “Wigwams and teepees.”

When it came to Indian shelters, Kate was on shaky ground. She rather thought that wigwams and teepees went with people of the western plains while woodland tribes had built huts of woven twigs and bark, but she wasn’t prepared to argue the point with Mary Pat. She really should get a book, she decided, and in the meantime, she’d stick to what Jake had told her.

“You see, the Indians that lived around here never quite learned how to make clay pots that were strong enough to sit over a campfire; so if they wanted to cook a stew, they’d fill a pot with meat and vegetables and water and then they’d bring smooth stones like this one up from the creek and put them in the fire. When the stones were red-hot, the cook would drop two or three into the stew and begin heating the food. As soon as one cooled off, she’d fish it out, put it back in the fire and drop in another. Jake told me it didn’t take much longer than cooking right over the fire.”

“Stone soup!” exclaimed Mary Pat.

“Not exactly,” said Kate, but she could tell from the look in the child’s eyes that the connection had been made.

Gordon noted her rueful face as Mary Pat dashed across the furrows after another possible arrowhead. “What is it?” he smiled.

“I have a feeling that from now on, whenever Mary Pat hears that old folk tale about the clever beggar who tricked the stingy woman into making him soup, she’s probably going to picture the fat hausfrau with feathered headband and plaited pigtails.”

“If we had some ham, we’d have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs,” chanted Mary Pat.

That was one of the nonsense lines Lacy had taught her. Time hadn’t helped much there and Kate began to doubt if Lacy would ever accept her presence. They walked around each other as warily as two cats and the kitchen was almost their only point of contact.

Kate had begun skipping breakfast again, waiting until Lacy went outside to do chores before she fixed herself a pot of tea; and Lacy avoided the kitchen at noon. Kate suspected that he snacked on soft drinks and cheese crackers up at Mrs. Fowler’s store. Supper was a silent affair, prepared by Kate and eaten with the television tuned to a local news station. Lacy usually cleaned up the kitchen afterward and watched television till bedtime while Kate retired to her room immediately after supper to write letters, read, or jot design ideas in her notebook.

Without Miss Emily popping in or her walks with Mary Pat and Gordon, Kate felt her vocal cords would have atrophied. Even taciturn Tom Whitley was more forthcoming than Lacy. If it weren’t for the baby, she knew she would have fled back to New York.

Yet Jake had loved this farm, had drawn strength from the land, and renewed himself with frequent trips back. It was his child’s birthright, Kate thought fiercely, and no mean-spirited, begrudging old coot was going to take that away.

Still, it was so contrary to what she had hoped for. She knew Lacy had always resented her, but to resent the baby, too? He was good with Mary Pat, patient and even playful at times, so it wasn’t as if he disliked children on principle. And he’d adored Jake. How could he not look forward to the birth of Jake’s child?

Ever since that Saturday when Sheriff Poole and Dwight Bryant had raised the possibility that Jake’s death might have been murder, Lacy had been as prickly as a stinging nettle. Two weeks were a long time to sulk over being asked if he’d touched that envelope of Jake’s war souvenirs, but Kate couldn’t think of any other legitimate grievances.

“Might as well accept it once and for all,” she thought. “He just doesn’t like you. Never has, never will.”

Into her memory floated one of her father’s no-nonsense dicta: What can’t be cured must be endured.

Well, she’d endure until July, she decided, following Gordon down the sloping hillside. After that, she or Lacy one would have to leave the farm.

Running ahead of them, Mary Pat had reached the edge of the woods. Pleasantly tired, Kate and Gordon joined her on neighboring tree stumps. Mary Pat began to count the rings of one smooth stump that was nearly a yard in diameter. An oak? Poplar?

Gordon looked around approvingly. “Lacy and Sauls are making a good job of it,” he said.

Kate had to agree. The two elderly men had culled out the diseased trees and cleaned up as they went. She had seen some logging stands that looked as if a tornado had gone through them, with limbs and broken tops wantonly left wherever the chain saw had cut them.

Here, though, Sauls had hauled out the logs as soon as each tree was felled, then he and Lacy piled up the brush and burned it—to keep the borers from spreading to other trees, as she had been reminded last week when she came upon the two putting a saw to the half-dozen walnut trees that lined the pecan grove on the south side of the farmhouse.

“Do they have beetles, too?” she had asked, surprised.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Sauls, who turned off the saw to answer her. Lacy had continued to swing his axe as if he didn’t see her.

“You can see how these branches ain’t got no green on ’em,” said Sauls. “Borer beetles’ll do that and you don’t want ’em spreading to the pecans.”

She certainly didn’t. Black walnuts were so tedious to pick out, requiring a heavy hammer to crack the thick shells, that most years no one bothered to gather them. The unique flavor might be delicious, but pecans were also tasty and much easier to shell. So far, at least, the pecan trees looked healthy and were pushing out vigorous green tips. She had given a last look at the old bare-twigged walnuts and then had returned to the house before Lacy’s continued snub made conversation with Sauls too uncomfortable.

Today as she and Gordon examined the lower stand of trees, one could barely tell that any cutting had occurred here beyond an occasional fresh stump. The woods were a little more open, that was all, and new growth would soon fill in the bare spots.

“Sauls says they’re almost finished,” said Kate. “There must be at least four cords of firewood up at the house by now.”