She hesitated. “I’ve never been out to Ridley’s Mill.”
I was surprised. “Never?”
She shook her head and her ponytail swayed with each movement.
The phone rang for the ten-thousandth time, and all at once, getting out of the office suddenly sounded like a great idea. “But we’ll have to run by the house first and let me change clothes,” I told her.
My strappy green sandles and linen skirt weren’t up to hiking through brambles and poison oak.
The sun was still high and hot in the western sky when we reached Cotton Grove. Gayle left her car at the Tastee-Freez and we got us a Mountain Dew with lots of ice to drink as we drove on through town together.
New Forty-Eight-new in the fifties before I was born- crossed back over Possum Creek on a wide four-lane bridge and headed due south to Makely; but I automatically took Old Forty-Eight, a narrow, two-lane blacktop that followed the bends and crooks of the creek past birches and tulip poplars and weeping willows on one side of the road and broad fields of young green tobacco on the other. Once I could have driven this road with my eyes closed, just put my T-bird on automatic pilot and let it find its way back to the farm exactly like my grandfather’s mules always carried him home no matter how blind drunk he was.
“And if he’d stuck to mules, he’d still be alive to this very day,” Daddy always said, even though the last time I heard him say it my grandfather would have been pushing a hundred and five. Knotts are long-lived but I never heard of any that made it much past ninety-five.
What actually killed my grandfather was when he passed out at the wheel of his T-model truck, the way he used to pass out at the reins, and crashed into the creek.
That’s one version.
Another’s that he had a load of whiskey in the back and was trying to outrun revenuers when they shot out his lights.
In both versions, so much whiskey went into Possum Creek that night that the bullfrogs started croaking out “Sweet Adeline” in four-part harmony and catfish were staggering up on the banks to cheer them on.
I tried to find an objective version in the Ledger once, but that was back when the editor’s wife was writing the death notices and they say she was a good-hearted person who hated it when her husband printed facts that shamed an innocent family. Miss Annie’s flowery language didn’t always make it clear whether a person died in bed or with a noose around his neck, but “untimely tragedy” usually meant an unexpected death that wasn’t going to have legal repercussions-anything from a mule hoof in the head to a husband coming home unexpectedly.
In my grandfather’s case, mention was made of the bereft widow, of grieving progeny with “no father’s hand to guide them,” and of a fifteen-year-old son suddenly “o’er-burdened with manhood’s somber responsibilities by fate’s stern necessity.”
They don’t write obituaries like that any more.
Or give out many tombstones like the ornate monument Daddy reared to his father’s memory a few years later when he had the money.
Nowadays, they stick you out in a field with flat brass nameplates that won’t hinder the tractor mowers. Instead of marble urns, you get little flip-up brass vases, so that on decoration days a modern graveyard looks like a child’s drawing of a treeless cow pasture with tufts of plastic flowers stuck in all over. Personally, I want to lie beneath huge magnolias or under live oaks draped in mournful Spanish moss. And if I can’t have a ten-foot obsidian shaft with gold lettering, or a lifesize weeping angel, I say the hell with it. Just cremate me and scatter my ashes over the Colleton County Courthouse where I can be an irritating cinder in Judge Perry Byrd’s eye.
The Whiteheads tried to talk Jed out of it, but he got a double stone for Janie. Gleaming white marble, three feet high. Her side has her name and dates and a broken lily to signify that she’d been cut down in the bloom of life. His has a stem of bleeding hearts, his birthdate, and then a dash.
He probably really did think he’d spend the rest of his life grieving for her. Wonder how Dinah Jean felt attending sunrise services every Easter morning, watching Jed and Gayle put flowers on the grave with that place at Janie’s side reserved for Jed?
As if she’d been following along in my mind, Gayle said, “Did you know they had to take Mom back to the sanatorium?”
I eased off the gas pedal and glanced over at her. All the windows were open and her brown ponytail was streaming in the wind as her coral lips pursed around the straw of her drink. Like me, she had on sunglasses, too, and I couldn’t read her eyes.
“What happened?”
“The same old thing. She got to drinking too much again, and then she’d call up and just start crying if it was me answered. If it was Dad, she’d hang up. I tried not to let him know, but…” Her hand sketched futility. “Anyhow, the Raynors took her back up there day before yesterday.”
“Rough on you, honey.”
“Not really. I mean, I hate what she’s doing to herself and I just wish I could help somehow. I thought if I went up to see her. Maybe talk with her doctors? But Gran says I ought to wait awhile. Give her a couple of weeks to dry out.”
“Probably a good idea,” I murmured. My hair swirled over my sunglasses and I propped an elbow on the window edge to keep it pushed back while steering with the fingers of my right hand. Except for an occasional tractor, there was almost no traffic on the road.
Gayle finished her drink, then drew a pack of cigarettes from her purse. “You mind if I smoke?”
“I grew up on a tobacco farm, remember?” Part of my income still came from an allotment I’d inherited from Mother. All the same, schizoid and hypocritical or not, it disappointed me a bit to see her light up with such graceful familiarity.
“I just don’t understand how Dad can be so cold about it,” Gayle said, exhaling pensively. “The way he’s cut her off completely and won’t see her and doesn’t want to talk about her. I know he gives her alimony, but he acts like he never- that they never-I mean she was his wife! Not a hired housekeeper or something. And the Raynors don’t know how to help her. They say they watch her like a hawk, but she keeps getting liquor from somewh-”
Again she caught herself.
“Listen, Gayle,” I said. “I’d appreciate it if you’d quit acting like I’ve never heard of white liquor, okay?”
She tugged at her seat belt and twisted around to half face me. “You don’t mind talking about it?”
I tapped my horn and pulled around a slow-moving farm truck loaded down with hundred-pound bags of fertilizer. “What’s to talk?”
When I didn’t answer, her hand gently touched my blue-jeaned knee.
“Deb’rah? I’m sorry. I guess it must be for you like it is for me when people slip and talk about murders and shootings and then remember it’s more than just words.”
I was suddenly seized by a perverse curiosity. “What do people say about my father?”
She fiddled with her cigarette and didn’t answer.
“Do they still say he’s the biggest bootlegger in eastern North Carolina? Go ahead. I really want to know. It won’t hurt my feelings.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“I’ve heard he used to have men working stills for him all over the county,” she began carefully. “I also heard they even did a television program on him one time?”
“He was mentioned,” I admitted. “The program was supposed to be about Southern politics.”
The filming of that documentary accidentally coincided with right after Daddy got his conviction expunged, and they used his circumstances as yet another illustration of the power wielded by one of our senators back then. Mother probably let me stay up to watch it with the rest of the family so I’d be prepared, but I was only eight years old, for God’s sake. Even though I felt the tension in the living room as the program unfolded, the segment about Daddy must have been full of speculations and innuendoes that went right over my head because I know I kissed him good night and went to bed happy that his picture had been on television and still thinking he sat on God’s right footstool.
I didn’t know a thing about those eighteen months in Atlanta till I got on the school bus next morning and was greeted by silent stares. Tax evasion, federal penitentiaries, expungements- none of those terms had meaning for me. I’m not sure I fully understood what bootlegging even was, only that it was something shameful and criminal and suddenly connected to us. I still remember the bewilderment I felt, then the scalding embarrassment when
