Long Upon the Land (20 page)

I
left Dwight and Cal digging for worms in the compost pile. They swore we were going to have pan fish for supper.

At the homeplace, Daddy’s truck was gone, but Maidie sat on the back porch shelling butter beans. “Not real sure where he’s gone, Deb’rah,” she said. “He’ll be back ’fore long, though. He knows I’m making spareribs and corn fritters for supper and he ain’t gonna miss that.”

I joined her on the porch and began helping her shell.

“Y’all getting all the butter beans you want?” she asked. “’Cause Cletus and Mr. Kezzie’s got plenty to spare if one of y’all want to come pick them.”

“We’re fine for beans,” I said. “You know Dwight. He overplants just like everybody else on this farm.”

“Don’t never hurt to have some extra to share,” Maidie said comfortably. “I sent some to Will and Amy this morning and Bel says Herman and Nadine will be out tomorrow to pick over at their place.” She sighed. “Does seem so hard that that boy’s still in a wheelchair.”

Herman is Haywood’s twin and barely survived arsenic poisoning a few years back. With his walker, he can manage to get to the bathroom, but his motorized wheelchair is easier for most of his day-to-day activities.

We shelled in companionable silence as the sun sank toward the treetops. Maidie’s about fifteen years older than me and I realized she might know things about Mother and Daddy that I didn’t.

“Remind me again how old you were when you started keeping house here?”

“I was sixteen when I come. You won’t even walking good. Not that you needed to walk. Them boys acted like you was their play toy and they’d’ve carried you around on their shoulders till you was grown if Miss Sue hadn’t made them put you down. But I won’t housekeeper, I was just extra help for your mama and Aunt Essie. You remember her, don’t you?”

“Oh yes,” I said. We all loved Aunt Essie. Daddy had hired her after his first wife died and she had stayed on after he married Mother. Mother wasn’t afraid of hard work, but she had no intention of killing herself with it. Everyone said Annie Sue had worked from first light till last dark, but if she found time to play with the boys or walk out to look at the land for pure pleasure, I never heard about it. Mother loved her life out here on the farm and she wanted to take time to savor it, which is why she paid a washerwoman to come do the laundry. She also kept Aunt Essie on to help her with the other household chores so that she wasn’t too tired at night to read to us or play the piano while Daddy played his fiddle and we all joined in on the singing.

Aunt Essie stayed with us till she went up to Philadelphia for the birth of her first grandchild where she met and married a Philadelphia policeman.

By then, some of the older boys had married and moved out of the house, so Mother and Maidie managed alone. Aunt Essie used to bring her grandchildren down to visit in the summer and Maidie still gets Christmas cards from that daughter.

“Did Mother ever talk much about how she and Daddy met and wound up getting married?” I asked.

“She didn’t have to, honey. Aunt Essie was here the first time she came out to the farm. After Frank and Robert fell through the ice. And then she helped Frank save his mama’s footprints. You know that story.”

“Yes, but those stories are about Mother and the boys. What about Daddy?”

“He loved her better than Peter loved the Lord. You know that, too.”

“But did she ever talk about how he proposed or how she decided to say yes?”

Maidie thought a minute and then shook her head. “Now that you mention it, I don’t think so. It was like they were the two matching halves to something whole and you couldn’t think of one being without the other. Didn’t take ’em long, though. Aunt Essie said they met around Christmas and got married in May, right after Miss Zell and Mr. Ash did.”

“Did she ever mention a man named Mac? A pilot that she met during the war?”

“No, not that I ever heard. Who was he?”

“She told me that he changed her life, but she never said exactly how. I thought maybe she told you.”

Maidie smiled. “No. All she ever said was how lucky she was to find Mr. Kezzie and the boys. She used to tease him that she fell in love with them first and that the only reason she married him was for his fiddle-playing.”

That made me smile, too.

“If it’s fretting you, how come you don’t just ask him?”

“Oh, you know how he gets when he thinks we’re prying into his private business.”

“Seems to me like he’s not as touchy about that as he used to be. The children have been over a lot lately, asking him about what it was like when he was young and he’s been telling them, so I reckon he’d talk to you.”

“Really? Which children?”

She rattled off the names and it was basically the kids who still live on the farm and who want to stay here and work the land. They’ve been trying various crops to replace tobacco. The prettiest were the four acres of sunflowers and another two acres of fragrant white tuberoses. I forget what else they’re trying, but if they really want to farm, it’s going to take a lot of hard work. I was disappointed to see them growing so much corn, but cows have to eat, I guess.

I had brought along the pictures of Adam and Karen’s boys and, like me, Maidie noticed all the family resemblances. She, too, sighed to think how they would never come back from California. Would never feel a part of life on this land.

She went inside to wash the beans and put them on to cook. I had about decided I needed to go back home myself when Daddy drove up in his truck.

“Well, hey, shug,” he said as I walked out into the yard to meet him. “If I’d’ve knowed you was here, I’d’ve come back quicker. Your menfolks with you?”

“No, they’re probably out on the pond right now, trying to catch our supper.”

“You’re welcome to stay and eat with me. Maidie’s making spareribs and corn fritters.”

“Sounds good,” I said, standing on tiptoe to kiss his stubbly cheek, “but I’ve got my mouth set for pan fish. I just thought I’d come and tell you that Tyler Earp’s been arrested for killing his brother.”

He wanted to hear the details, so we went back up on the porch and Maidie came out to hear, too.

When I finished, Maidie stood up and said she’d be getting on over to her house with her and Cletus’s supper. “The ribs and the beans are done and I left the batter all made up, Deb’rah. All you have to do is fry it.”

I knew she was leaving so I could ask Daddy the things that had been “fretting” me, as she put it. I kissed her smooth brown cheek and whispered, “Thanks, Maidie.”

“Here, now,” Daddy said. “You don’t need to be cooking my supper.”

“Don’t be selfish,” I teased. “Maidie knows how I like corn fritters and I’m sure she made enough for you to share.”

We went into the kitchen and I turned the gas on under Mother’s favorite black iron griddle and added a little olive oil. While it heated, I fixed Daddy a plate of boiled ribs and butter beans with diced onions and tomatoes, then dropped batter by the spoonfuls onto the sizzling hot griddle. Minutes later, the first were ready for Daddy’s plate.

He didn’t stand on ceremony. Hot and crispy corn fritters are delicious. Cold ones? Not so much.

After I’d made as many as he thought he could eat, I poured the rest of the batter into a jar to take home to Dwight and Cal. They would go great with fish.

While Daddy ate, I nibbled on a fritter and showed him the pictures of his West Coast grandsons.

“Real nice-looking boys,” he said. “Bet they can’t drive a tractor good as Cal, though.”

I laughed. “Bet they don’t want to, either.”

When he’d finished eating and I’d stuck the leftovers in the refrigerator, he said, “Let’s go back on the porch. Gonna be a real pretty evening and Maidie’s started fussing if I smoke up her kitchen too much.”

He reached for his pack of Marlboros and I used Mother’s Zippo to light his cigarette. He took it from me and turned it in his hands as if it were something precious. “Will give you this?”

I nodded. “She ever talk to you about the man who gave it to her?”

“Mac? Yeah, she did.” He pulled the lighter apart and ran his index finger across the inscription. “About Leslie, too.”

“I know it’s really none of my business, Daddy, and you don’t need to tell me if you don’t want to, but right near the end, she told me that he changed her life. She was fixing to tell me how, but somebody—I think it was Aunt Zell—came in about then and we never got back around to that story.”

“And you want to know how a man that went and got hisself killed in the war told Sue it was all right to marry somebody like me?”

“Is that what he did?”

Daddy took a long drag on his cigarette and leaned back in the squeaky glider. “How much you know about him?”

So I told him about my sessions in New Bern and how I’d talked to Dr. Livingston’s son and Mac’s cousin and how he hadn’t died in the war but lived another thirty years in Paris.

“Yeah? Wish your mama could’ve knowed that.”

I also told him how Mac’s nephew had exploded in anger when I asked about Mac.

Daddy gave a sour laugh. “Yeah, I reckon he did.”

“People are such bigots,” I said hotly, “but you’d think he’d be over it by now. It’s been legal for blacks and whites to marry in this state since 1971.”

Daddy frowned. “Who told you Leslie was a black woman?”

L
oosely wrapped in a warm blanket, Sue sits cross-legged on the pallet and watches Kezzie throw another log on the fire. She never tires of looking at his naked body. He’s tall and thin, but there’s strength in the muscles of his arms and long legs. She’s glad he’s not hairy and loves running her fingers across his smooth chest until his nipples harden and he goes down on her.

In the last two weeks, they have almost turned this end of the ruined house into a real room. He has framed a partition across the open end and tacked burlap bags on both sides of the uprights to cut the chill January wind and hide themselves from any prying eyes. More boards serve as a table and bench and she now stashes extra quilts and blankets in the trunk of her car to cushion the tarp he has laid across the rough planks of the floor.

No one knows where she goes almost every morning, or even that she does go. Her mother never gets up before ten and has little interest in what either daughter does as long as it doesn’t embarrass her. Her father is in his office by eight and Zell is caught up in wedding plans and furnishing the house where she and Ash will live after the wedding.

Out in the kitchen, Mary notices when Miss Sue wraps three or four sausage biscuits in waxed paper and fills the thermos bottle with coffee. She suspects there is a man, but no one asks her what Miss Sue does and Mary doesn’t speak out of turn. She just fries up extra sausage patties and makes sure that a few biscuits never make it to the breakfast table.

Kezzie turns now and sees her watching him. He’s still a little shy about exposing his body and is soon back under the quilts again. She drops the blanket from her own bare shoulders and slips in next to him. After the urgency of their first needs, this is when they just hold each other. If they do make love a second time, it’s slower. Sweeter.

Eventually, he sighs, kisses her again, and turns to get dressed. She will go back to Dobbs to be a dutiful daughter and sister while he goes back to earning a living for his small sons. (She knows what he does but this is the one thing they do not discuss.)

Today though, she continues to lie there watching as he pulls on his pants, buttons his shirt, and ties the laces on his brogans.

“What?” he says when she props her head up on one elbow.

“I’ve been thinking about if we get married.”

“Huh?”

“Zell’s marrying Ash the first week in May and I’m her maid of honor. If you and I got married a week or two later, she’d be back from the honeymoon. I could wear her gown and she could wear my bridesmaid dress, so that would save a lot of money. I don’t care about having a lot of bridesmaids.”

“Now wait a minute,” he says.

“I know you probably don’t want a church wedding, but Mother will absolutely curl up and die if we don’t, and I can’t do that to her.”

“We ain’t getting married.”

“Why? Don’t you love me?”

“Love’s got nothing to do with it, shug.”

“How can you say that? Love’s got everything to do with it.” She looks at him almost shyly. “You do love me, don’t you? I certainly love you and your little boys, too. You need a wife and they need a mother.”

“We ain’t even knowed each other a whole month.”

“If you count the Christmas dance, it’ll be a full month on Saturday and I know all I need to know about you. You’re a good man, Kezzie Knott, and a good father.” She smiles, her eyes dancing with mischief. “And much as I love being out here like this with you, come summer and mosquitoes—”

He doesn’t smile back. “We ain’t getting married, Sue. We’re too different. You’ve been to college, I ain’t even been to high school.”

“I quit after one semester and yes, I’ve read a couple of Shakespeare’s plays and I took a year of geometry in high school.” Her voice turns coaxing. “But you can make sense out of a complicated deed, you turn a profit with that store you own, and I watched you build that burlap wall without knowing a thing about the Pythagorean theorem.”

“The what?”

“Pythagoras. A Greek mathematician who figured out how to make a right angle.” She waves Pythagoras away impatiently. “I may have book learning but you know how to do things, build things. Think how much we can teach the boys.”

He shakes his head. “Your daddy ain’t gonna let his daughter marry a bootlegger.”

There it is. Finally out in the open, yet she brushes his admission aside with no more concern than if he’s said he’s a Fuller Brush Man.

“I don’t need anybody’s permission,” she says firmly. “I hope he’ll give us his blessing, but I’ll marry you without it if I have to. Besides, you might be surprised. Dad respects you.”

Surprised is too weak a word. “He does?”

She nods. “He does.”

He turns that over in his head, then sighs. “All the same, you can’t marry me. You need somebody like him. A lawyer or a doctor.”

“I don’t want a lawyer or a doctor.” Rebellion flashes in her eyes. “I want the father of my baby. I’m pregnant, Kezzie.”

He’s shocked. “You ain’t!” His own eyes go to the shiny little packet that lies next to their pallet. “You can’t be.”

He picks up the packet and waves it at her. “I used one of these every time.”

“Not every time, darling. Not those first two times.”

He groans and sinks down beside her. “Oh Lordy, Sue.”

When he tries to put his arms around her, she turns away in tears. “You really
don’t
love me, do you?”

He pulls her to him and kisses her until she yields to his embrace. “It scares me how much I love you, but I’m not right for you. Why can’t you see that?” He pushes the hair back from her face and his blue eyes are sad. “I can’t give you all the things you’re used to. You’re a town girl, honey, and running a farm’s hard work. Besides, them boys ain’t gonna keep acting like little angels once they get used to you.”

“I’m not afraid of hard work, Kezzie. Don’t you see? I want it. I
need
it. I can’t stay in town and twiddle my thumbs and pretend I’m doing something with my life. Out here is real. The boys are real. The land is real.
You’re
real. This is what I want.”

“Are you sure, Sue? Really sure?”

“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my whole life.”

She hasn’t realized how tense he is until she feels his arms relax around her and he finally smiles.

“Another baby, huh? Well! Maybe this one will be a girl. I always did want a little girl.”

She stops smiling. Guilt floods through her veins and the look on her face puzzles him.

“What’s wrong?”

Her eyes are brimming with tears again.

Alarmed, he says, “What? Tell me!”

“Promise you won’t be mad at me, Kezzie?”

“Mad at you? Mad about what?”

“I’m not really pregnant,” she confesses. “I was going to trick you. Make you think you
had
to marry me. But I can’t do that to you. If you don’t love me enough to marry me before God and my friends and my father, then—”

He laughs out loud and hugs her to him tighter than ever. “Oh, honey! I even love you enough to marry you in front of your mama, poor lady.”

He folds up the quilts and blankets while she dresses. “Second week of May, huh?”

Her smile is radiant. “Second week of May.”

“Reckon I’ll have to buy me a new suit. And new clothes for the boys.”

He takes a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his jacket and offers her one. “Still can’t figure where you get the nerve to do this. Not much scares me, Miss Stephenson, but you got me beat by miles on this one.”

Before he can strike a match, she pulls out Mac’s lighter, hesitates, then hands it to him.

He turns it in his fingers. “Who’s W.R.M.?”

“Walter Raynesford McIntyre.”

“Old boyfriend?” He flips back the lid of the Zippo and lights their cigarettes. “Do I need to be jealous?”

“No, he’s a friend who didn’t come back from the war. But he’s why I know I’m right to follow my heart. He’s the one who showed me what happens to people when they don’t.”

She pulls apart the lighter so he can read the hidden inscription. “Let me tell you about Mac and Leslie.”