“What happened?” I asked, too surprised to answer his question.
“Way I heard it, he went out to get in his truck yesterday morning and a couple of black fellows come up in a red pickup—Ford or Chevy. She couldn’t say which.”
“She?”
“His wife. She said it was the same two as he’d chased off his land Monday evening. She said they was talking and she commenced to make a fresh pot of coffee and then she heard gunshots and that pickup went screeching out of the yard. When she run out, he was laying dead next to his rig. Sheriff’s got a call out on the pickup but she couldn’t tell him a license plate or nothing.”
Again he looked at me curiously. “Did you know him, Judge?”
“A long, long time ago,” I said.
I should’ve either let it go, or phoned around my family for more solid information; but it was October and even if our trees hadn’t yet flamed red and gold, fall was in the air, and could be stirring up the ashes of things I’d just as soon my family didn’t remember.
Leaving Overby in the parking lot, I walked down the back stairs of the courthouse to the Sheriff’s Department, but Dwight wasn’t there. Nor was Sheriff Bo Poole.
I did ask a deputy if there’d been any development in the Stancil shooting, but he shrugged. “Last I heard, the body’s still over in Chapel Hill. Don’t know why it’s taking ’em so long. Two barrels at close range, what the heck they
What indeed?
Aunt Zell’s big white brick house sits on a quiet residential street six blocks from the courthouse. It was silent and empty when I let myself in a few minutes later because blues were running down at the coast and she and Uncle Ash had gone down to Harkers Island for a week of fishing. They’d taken Hambone with them, so I didn’t even have a dog to greet me.
Didn’t matter. I dumped my garment bag and briefcase on the deacon’s bench inside the door and headed straight down the hall for the deep freezer on the side porch. Like most women around here, Aunt Zell keeps two or three casseroles on hand at all times for emergencies, and the top one was baked chicken, garden peas, sliced hard-boiled eggs and mushroom soup with a drop-biscuit topping. She had thoughtfully printed the heating instructions on the outer layer of tinfoil in case the bereaved had too much perishable food on hand and wanted to wait till the next day to serve it.
I stuck it in an ice chest, which I carried back out to the car. On my way out of town, I stopped off at a 7- Eleven for a bag of ice and a couple of liters of chilled Pepsis and ginger ale. So many people always gather at the home of the deceased that they usually run out of drinks and ice halfway through the evening.
The preacher that lurks on the outer fringes of my mind nodded approvingly as I added my purchases to the ice chest, but the cynical pragmatist who shares headspace with him whispered, “
“
I only knew Dallas’s third wife, his widow now, by that sort of snide hearsay.
Hearsay said she’d been waiting tables at a truck stop in north Florida when Dallas pulled off I-95 for a late night hamburger about six or seven years ago.
“Hamburger?” one of my cattier sisters-in-law had snorted at the time. “That’s a new name for it. Big hair, big boobs, skinniest bee-hind I ever saw.”
“It’s them leopard print stirrup pants,” another sister-in-law said.
They were giggling about leopard pants when I came into the room.
“Who y’all trashing now?” I asked curiously.
They glanced at each other, then, careless-like, one said, “You remember that Dallas Stancil? He went and got himself a new wife with two half-grown young’uns. Third time lucky, maybe.”
I suppose they told me all the gossip they’d heard, but it barely registered.
Did I remember Dallas?
Oh, yes.
And as I drove through the gathering dusk of early October, I remembered him again.
Twelve or fifteen years older. A hard-drinking, hard-driving roughneck. Not the kind of man any of my brothers would want me associating with.
And maybe he did drive me to the devil, but hey, I was raring to go, wasn’t I? Begged him to take me, in fact.
And to do him justice, he went in and picked me up and drove me out again before I got more than just a little singed around the edges.
Did I remember Dallas Stancil?
Enough that I owed him at least the ritual of paying my respects by taking his widow a casserole.
The moon was rising fat and orange in the east, nearly full when I passed through Cotton Grove and headed south on Old Forty-Eight. The road gets rural real quick once you pass the last streetlight—big empty fields and thick woodlands with only a few house lights shining from yards back off the road. So far, most of the growth has been on the other side of Possum Creek where New Forty-Eight cuts a nearly straight line between Cotton Grove and Makely. The original highway meanders along the west bank and follows every bend and crook of the creek. I could almost drive it blindfolded.
Or without headlights, which is the next thing up from a blindfold on a moonlit night like this.
I don’t know what it is about those lazy S-curves where the road dips down into the bottom between stands of oaks and poplars and sweet gums, but I can never drive through them without automatically speeding up. I haven’t had a speeding ticket in four years, but there are two places in Colleton County where I’m bound to hit 80 even if I know there’s a trooper with a radar gun behind every tree. One of them’s that deserted stretch that crosses
