He scratched the dog’s soft-as-velvet ears, then the three of them ambled slowly on down the lane that circled the perimeter of this field. Cool early mornings used to mean the beginning of another day of hard sweaty work— fields to plow, animals to tend, the hundred and one backbreaking chores that make up a farmer’s daily life.
Back at the house, Sue and Essie would be fixing breakfast, rousting the boys out of bed, asking the older ones to fill the woodbox and feed the chickens, sending the younger ones off to school . . .
The whole farm would buzz with meaningful work and raucous laughter.
He almost never thought about his first wife, but Annie Ruth had always liked mornings best, too. More times than he could count, she would be up before him. She scorned mirrors and plaited her hair by touch alone into a long thick braid as she looked out their window to watch the first light define the trees and fields beyond.
“Time to get moving,” she would say briskly if he lay in bed too long to watch her.
Now his house was silent and empty every morning until Maidie came over to make breakfast; and even though he only piddled at working this past year or two, he still felt driven to walk the back lanes each day, to see his fields and woods as fresh and new as the dawn of creation, to make sure that everything was well within the borders of his land. Annie Ruth had usually been too busy to come walking, but Sue used to say, “Now don’t you look all the pretty off the morning till I can come, too,” and she would often slip away from the demands of the boys and the house to join him out here.
Together they would pause to enjoy the dogwoods that bloomed among the tall pines, to smell the sweet scent of wild crab apples on the ditchbanks or note that the corn could use a little side-dressing of soda to green it up. Away from the house and the boys, they could talk about the larger issues in their life together, the needs of someone in their extended families, or the help they might could give the proud man who was having a hard time of it. They could discuss what to do about Andrew or Frank and whether a good talking-to would be enough to keep those two out of trouble or if it was going to take a trip to the woodshed to get the point across.
Yet they had all turned out well, he thought, as he ran their faces through his mind, taking stock of his sons as he took stock of his land. The Navy had straightened Frank out; and Sue’s patience and April’s love had straightened Andrew. There were problems with some of the grandchildren, but they would come out right in the end, too. Of this he had no doubt.
A few feet ahead of him, the younger dog suddenly went on alert. He followed the direction of her point and saw a doe emerge from the woods at the far edge of the field. Behind her two young fawns hesitated, half hidden by the grapevines that hung down from the trees. Ladybelle gave an almost inaudible whine and Blue strained to see what had alerted her. Both of them looked back at him, but he gave the hand signal to stay and they obeyed. Nevertheless, the doe had caught his slight movement and she and the fawns melted back into the trees.
As the sun rose behind the pines and began to burn off the mist, he heard the sound of a motor and turned to see a small black truck slowly easing through the sandy ruts. He stood quietly until the truck pulled even with him and the driver cut its engine. The white man behind the wheel appeared to be in his mid-thirties and wore a gray work shirt with the name ENNIS embroidered in red on the breast pocket. His short brown hair had thinned across the crown but he had not yet begun to go gray.
“Sorry to bother you, Mr. Kezzie, but Miz Holt said you were out here and might not mind.”
“Not a bit,” Kezzie Knott said politely and waited for the man to identify himself.
“You probably don’t remember me, but I’m James Ennis, Frances Pritchard’s grandson.”
The Pritchard land touched some that he owned over in the next township and Kezzie nodded at that familiar name. “You must be one of Mary’s boys.”
“Yessir.” The younger man got out of the truck and extended his hand.
“What can I do for you, son?”
“It’s about my grandmother, Mr. Kezzie. She’s about to give away more of our land. Grandy might’ve left it in her name, but you know good as me he wanted her to pass it on down to my mother. It’s been in our family over two hundred years and yeah, nobody wants to farm it any more, but it don’t seem right for her to let somebody have for free what the whole family’s sweated and bled for all these years. She says she’s giving it back to the Lord, but it’s not the Lord’s name that’s gonna be on that deed.”
Kezzie Knott lit a cigarette from the hard pack that was always in his shirt pocket and leaned against the truck to listen to a story whose outline had become all too familiar in the past few years. Land you could hardly give away thirty years ago was now so dear that the income it brought in barely paid the rising taxes. The details might be different but the results were often the same—old folks talked out of their land for peanuts on the dollar value while some slick developer made a bundle. The only difference here was that the slick operator was a preacher and not a developer.
“She’s always talked about you with respect, Mr. Kezzie. I was thinking that maybe if you could speak to her? It’s not just for me and mine neither, but you remember Nancy, Mama’s only sister?”
Kezzie Knott nodded. Frances Pritchard’s older daughter must be close to sixty now and still had the mind of a sweet-natured three-year-old.
“He’s promised Granny he’ll take care of Nancy till she dies but you know how much a promise is worth.”
“No more’n the air it’s written on,” the old man agreed. “Now I can’t make you no promises myself, son, but I’ll look into it for you and see what I can do.”
If nothing else, he thought, there was someone in the deeds office that he might could get to lose the papers and snarl up the transaction with red tape for a few weeks.
Mid-afternoon and Cameron Bradshaw firmed the dirt around the last of the purple petunias, then sat back on his padded kneeling stool to admire his handiwork.
It might not be the English gardens he remembered from the tours he had taken with his grandparents before they lost their money, nor the showpiece he had tended before he and Candace split up; nevertheless, its beauty pleased him.
“A poor thing, but mine own,” he murmured to himself. He pushed himself up off the stool, straightened his protesting joints, and tried again to remember who it was that said, “What every gardener needs is a cast-iron back with a hinge in it.”
The sun was not quite over the yardarm, but he decided he would pour himself a drink, locate his
