“Um-hmm, I see.” He kept driving, making the turns out of town into the countryside and onto Staton Bridge Road. After a while, he said, “What’re you going to do if it doesn’t work the way you want it to?”
“Don’t say what am
I
going to do, Sam. Ask what
we’re
going to do, and the answer is: I don’t know. Every time I think about it, which is just about all the time, I get so distraught I can hardly stand it.”
“We can count on Pickens, Julia. I’m sure of it.”
“Maybe, but can we count on Hazel Marie? I tell you, Sam, half the time she doesn’t know what she wants or what she’s doing.” I took my lip in my teeth, thought for a moment, then said, “How would you feel about moving?”
He gave me a quick glance. “Away from Abbotsville?”
I nodded. “Far away. Where nobody knows us or where those babies came from. We could do it, Sam, and it would keep us all together.” I stopped, bit my lip again, and went on. “A new church, new friends, new everything. A lot of people do it when they retire, and we could, too.” I took a Kleenex from my pocketbook, feeling a fullness in my eyes. “If it’s all the same to you, though, I wouldn’t choose Florida.”
Sam squeezed my hand. “That boy means a lot to you, doesn’t he?”
“More even than I realized,” I said, “until the possibility of losing him came up. But, Sam, the only thing that holds me back is you. It’s an awful lot to expect you to leave the town where you’ve lived and worked for so long, and where everybody knows you and respects you. This is your home, and I would hate to ask that of you.”
“Julia,” he said, “my home is wherever you are. If it comes down to it, we’ll do whatever we have to.”
“Oh, Sam,” I said, glad I had a Kleenex in hand since I was right before about needing it. “You are, without a doubt, the finest man in the world.”
“Well, hardly,” he said, patting my hand. “But it’s not going to come to that. Look ahead five or six years when those babies will be starting school. They’ll have been absorbed into the community by that time and nobody’ll think a thing about it. Oh, every once in a while, a few busybodies might do a little whispering, but it won’t affect them or us. The way things are going these days with all the odd-couple adoptions and test tube babies and surrogate mothers and who-knows-what-all, they’ll have more than enough to occupy their minds. At least,” Sam said with a smile, “we’re getting ours the old-fashioned way.”
“Thank goodness for that, I guess. Still,” I went on, “it comforts me to know that you’d be willing to move if it comes to that.”
Sam glanced at me with a smile. “What about Lillian? How would you get along without her?”
I did need the Kleenex then, and not just one but the rest of them in my pocketbook. Unable to answer, I just sniffed and wiped and blew and cried some more.
“Honey, listen,” Sam said, “I think you’re jumping the gun. We’re not moving anywhere, so you’re not going to lose Lillian or your friends or your home. Why, just think, what would you do off somewhere without Pastor Ledbetter and Emma Sue to keep things lively?”
I had to laugh in spite of the flow of tears. “You’re just trying to make me feel better.”
“Am I succeeding?”
“A little,” I conceded. “I know I tend to jump to the worst that could happen, although when you come down to it, maybe the worst has already happened.” I dried my face. “Who would’ve thought just a few weeks ago when everything was going so well that we’d be in this situation today? And Mr. Pickens could fix it all with only a word or two if he’d just do it. That’s why he vexes me half to death.”
“Hold on, Julia,” Sam said as he slowed the car and leaned over the steering wheel to look out the window. “I think we’re about there. Help me look for the mailbox.”
I not only looked at the names on the widely spaced mailboxes as we passed, I looked at the surroundings as well. It was farm country with small patches of vegetable gardens, lots of open pastureland, and some acres of gnarled and stunted apple trees. The houses that I could see were small and set far off the road, usually hemmed in by large trees and fronted by sweeps of well mown lawns.
“Wait, Sam. I think we just passed it.”
He stopped the car, looked in both directions of the empty road and slowly backed up to a black mailbox on a leaning post. The stick-on letters, BA N E, were on one side with one letter obviously unstuck and gone. The rutted, once-graveled drive on our left had weeds and wild oats growing on the center hump. The fields that stretched on each side of the drive were full of the same wild oats, left to go to seed.
Sam turned in and drove carefully up the drive as the car dipped and swayed, and weeds swished along the sides and bottom of the car. Fully half a mile in, we came to the typical ring of shade trees and shrubs that enclosed a two-story, once-white house and a few ramshackle outbuildings.
When the car stopped in front of the narrow porch, I sat and took in what might have once been the judge’s pride and joy. Square posts, imitating columns, held up the two-story roof of the porch. The windows were placed symmetrically on the facade, but they were too small and narrow to carry the attempt at Georgian architecture. And, would you believe, there was an abundance of Victorian gingerbread along the roofline? Whoever had designed the house had certainly not known what he was doing. But that was just my opinion.
“Well,” Sam said, turning off the ignition, “let’s see if she’s home.”
“You didn’t call her?”
“Unlisted.” Sam opened the car door, then hesitated. “I don’t see a car.”
“How about a dog?”
He grinned. “No dog, either.”
I got out and walked with him up three steps onto the concrete floor of the porch. “Somebody needs to get out here with a broom,” I whispered, noting the dirt that had been blown up against the house, as well as the twigs and leaves scattered across the porch.
“Nobody’s home, Sam. People in the country always come to the door as soon as they hear a car, and nothing’s stirring around here.”
“Let’s knock and see,” Sam said and proceeded to do just that, rattling the screen door with his fist.
All was quiet, except for the rustle of a breeze through the surrounding trees. I looked up at the high ceiling of the porch and nudged Sam. “Is that a dirt dauber or a wasp nest up there?”
Sam glanced up. “Dirt dauber, I hope.”
We both turned as the front door opened some few inches. It was dark inside compared to the bright sunlight where we were, so it was hard to see the woman peering out at us.
When she didn’t speak, Sam in his smooth and easy way took the initiative. “Miss Baine? I’m Sam Murdoch and this is my wife, Julia. I wonder if we could visit with you a few minutes? I’m writing a history of Abbot County, and your father was such an important personage that I’m thinking of devoting an entire chapter to him. I’d like to talk it over with you, get some personal anecdotes, and so on. It’s my intent to show every reader just how influential he was in making Abbot County what it is today.”
I thought he was laying it on a little thick, but it seemed to work. Miss Baine continued to stare out at us for a minute or two longer, then she opened the door and stepped back. “You can come in,” she said.
We walked into a dark hallway, and it took a while for my eyes to adjust. The hall was a room-sized square with wide, uneven pine boards on the floor and a staircase on the right side. One spindly-legged table stood against the left wall with a framed picture of a grim-faced woman above it. An old-fashioned coatrack, complete with a hazy mirror, suffering from dust or old age, was on the other side. It was loaded down with raincoats, men’s hats, and umbrellas.
As we followed Miss Baine into a sitting room, or perhaps it was called a parlor, I got my first good look at her. She was a sight. You couldn’t miss that hair. It made her look like a wild woman, for the iron-gray strands had no bounds, falling around her face and down her back. It had ripples or crinkles in it, as if it had been plaited and only recently brushed out. The amazing thing about it was that it seemed full of static electricity, and in this humid weather, too. Every time she moved, a fuzz of hair floated up around her head like a halo, or like she was in touch with one of those scientific exhibits in a museum that stands your hair on end. From the intense look in her eyes, it was my guess that she was generating all that electricity herself.
She wore a man’s white dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up and the shirttails hanging out. Below that was a black, gauzy skirt that reached her ankles and, below that, bare feet.
The parlor she led us into was filled with ornate Victorian pieces that would’ve been remarkably improved by some reupholstering. Maroon velvet covered the Duncan Phyfe sofa, every uncomfortable chair in the place, and draped the sides of each of the two windows. A small woodstove rested on a square of tin in front of the fireplace. Above the fireplace in the place of honor, so to speak, a large oval, wooden frame dominated the room. In it was a life-sized photograph, hand-tinted in washed-out colors, of the face of a frowning, hulking man. His eyes peered out from under thick eyebrows, as if to condemn whomever they lit upon. The judge, I judged, and shivered.
“You can set,” Miss Baine said abruptly, taking the center of the sofa herself and leaving the stiff chairs to us.
The room was hot, airless, and obviously rarely used. Sam took out his handkerchief and muffled a sneeze before saying, “We appreciate the chance to speak with you. I knew your father, worked with him when I practiced law, but I was never close to him. If you . . .”
“Nobody was close to him but me,” Miss Baine interrupted. “He didn’t suck up to everybody who come along, wantin’ this and wantin’ that. He was a great man. A smart man, smarter than all them lawyers and things that drove him out.”
Sam was quick. “I think you’re probably right. I think . . .”
“They’s no probably about it. He was done in by all them folks that don’t do nothing but tear down and whip up on and run people off. The judge oughta been governor of the state and he woulda been, but they wouldn’t have it, would they? Oh, no, get rid of the judge, they said, and they banded together and run him out.”
I was struck dumb by her tirade, which was just as well since I didn’t want to tangle with her. All the time she spoke, her angular face betrayed no emotion at all. Her voice did, though, for it was filled with bitterness and pent up resentment. Her brown eyes stared at Sam as if he’d been a ringleader in running her father out of office, when in fact the county voters hadn’t needed a ringleader. They’d put up with the judge’s arbitrary rulings long enough and had done the job by themselves.
“Well, Miss Baine,” Sam said soothingly, “your father served long and well on the bench, and the county owes him a debt of gratitude. I want to see that he is properly recognized, which is why . . .”
“The judge,” Miss Baine pronounced, “is right up there in that picture.” She waved her hand at the portrait above the fireplace but didn’t move her eyes from Sam. “I don’t never move it. He watches over this place. He built it, and he takes care of it, like he always done. Can’t nobody tear him down no more. They already done all they could do and it didn’t ‘mount to a hill of beans. They all just jealous.”
This woman is crazy,
I thought and glanced around to see how far I was from the door.
But Sam, in his mild and comforting way, said, “With your help, Miss Baine, I’d like to set the record straight. If you’ll let me, I want to formally interview you for my book. In that way, people can understand the kind of man he was.”
I thought Sam might’ve gotten through to her, for she continued to stare at him. Then I realized that she wasn’t looking at him but through him, her eyes and mind fixed on something in the room beyond. I turned to see what was there, but saw only dust motes in the sunlight that streamed through the half-opened curtains.
Then without any notice, the woman suddenly stood up, her lean body engulfed in the outsized clothes she wore. Sam immediately came to his feet, and I followed somewhat stiffly.
“Miss Baine?” he said.
She started for the door, then turned back to look up at the portrait. “Time to go,” she said. “The judge needs his dinner.”
Disappearing down the hall, she left us to find our way out. We immediately did so, uneasily closing the front door behind us and happily getting into the car.
“Sam,” I said, locking the car door, “that woman is crazy.”
Sam cranked the car and eased around the bare yard, looking for the opening to the drive. “Seems so, doesn’t it?” he said. “Pitiful, though. All alone out here with the memories of her father.”
“The judge,” I corrected him, smiling. Then with a shiver running down my back, I went on. “You reckon he’s really in there with her?”
“In her mind, Julia. Only in her mind.”
Chapter 37
I glanced back at the house as Sam carefully maneuvered the car around the bare yard toward the opening to the drive.
“Oh, Sam, she does get out, at least some,” I said, craning my neck to see along the side of the house. “An old green pickup’s parked back there. Remind me to watch out for it. I wouldn’t want to be on the road when she’s driving.”
“Goes out for groceries, I expect,” Sam said, his attention on the rutted lane. “I’m glad she’s not a total recluse. Even so, I’m going to ask the patrol deputies to look in on her every now and then. Make sure she’s all right.”
I smiled to myself, thinking that this was just one more instance of the kind of man I’d married. Thoughtful, he was, and concerned about others, even one as strange and unfriendly as Roberta Baine.
“So,” I said, as we bumped our way down the drive toward the highway, “it doesn’t look as if you’ll get much help from her. Even if she agreed to an interview, how could you trust anything she said?”