later that day in the girls’ bathroom, my best friend walked away from me and two of the other girls started chanting, “Your daddy’s been in ja-il! Your daddy’s been in ja-il!”
I jumped them both and the teacher had to come in and break it up, but not before one girl went flying against the sink and cut her jeering lip. Fighting normally got everybody involved five smacks on the palm with the teacher’s ruler, and though this was my first school fight, I expected the usual punishment. Instead, we only had to put our heads on our desks for the rest of recess. No note went home to my parents and the injured girl’s mother did not call mine, though she had always screamed when anybody touched her precious daughter.
I think that’s the day I realized Daddy did have a dark power that everyone else recognized.
As for the jeering of the other kids, that lasted barely a day. The little twins (three inches taller but fifteen years younger than the “big twins”) were in eighth grade then and Will was a senior. Not that I ever went running to any of my brothers to fight my battles, but they always seemed to hear about it pretty quick and nobody messed with me without risking biack eyes or bloody noses.
A slab-sided hound started across the road and I braked sharply. “Fool dog!”
It slunk back into the ditch weeds.
“What else do folks say?”
“Mostly they always talk about what a good man Mr. Kezzie is and how if anybody ever needs anything, they can always go to him.” Gayle leaned over and carefully stubbed out her cigarette in my ashtray. “Just last week he was sitting with some men in the store near Amy Blalock’s, and her mother and Mrs. Medlin were talking about the air conditioner giving out at the parsonage. They didn’t even know he was listening till he stood up and reached in his pocket, pulled out three hundred-dollar bills, and told her to put it in the collection plate toward a new unit. Some of the rough kids at school joke about getting some white lightning as good as Kezzie Knott used to make, but honest, nobody thinks your daddy’s actually messing with it any more. I mean, he’s really old now, isn’t he?”
“Almost eighty-two,” I agreed. Never mind that he moved and looked like a vigorous sixty and could still straight-arm an axe.
What she’d said came close to echoing what I heard from Reid last time I asked. After all, Daddy’d served his time before I was even born. And he’d kept so closely to his own land after Mother died that people were starting to think of him as part of the county’s colorful and rapidly disappearing past.
Or so Reid said.
I just hoped it’d stay that way till after the election, but Aunt Zell’s words yesterday morning had made me uneasy. Everybody “knew” that Daddy’s first wife had kept his secret books, just as everybody “knew” he’d kept that part of his life from touching my mother and-by extension-me. So far it hadn’t been an election issue. Probably because when cancer took Mother and Daddy moved back to the farm, I’d stayed in Dobbs with Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash whenever I came home from college.
The road curved again. I made a left turn into a rutted drive, then rolled to a stop, blocked by a heavy steel cable that had been stretched tautly across the lane to Ridley’s Mill. I would have ignored the No Trespassing sign, but the underbrush was too thick and the terrain too rough to drive my car around the barrier.
“Is it a long walk to the mill?” asked Gayle, peering down the lane that soon dissolved behind a leafy green barrier. Judging by its overgrown condition, no one had driven down there since winter.
I threw the car in reverse. “Less than a quarter of a mile, but I’ve got a better idea.”
It was only a short distance to where Old Forty-Eight crossed Possum Creek at the north corner of Knott land and then bordered our farm on the east side of the creek. About a half-mile on, I turned left into a rutted clay-and- gravel road that cut over to New Forty-Eight.
“Where’re we going?” Gayle said as we bucketed along, red clouds of dust boiling up behind us.
“Over to the Pot Shot.” I had to lift my voice to be heard above the rattles of the rough road. “If Michael Vickery’s there, we’ll get him to tell about the day you and your mother were found.”
10 i go crazy
At New Forty-Eight I made another left and headed back north toward Cotton Grove. A few minutes later, we were turning in at a ye olde quainte-type sign that pronounced this the entrance to the Pot Shot Pottery, open to the public only on weekends or by appointment.
This wasn’t the weekend, but neither were there no cables stretched across this lane, so I drove through a double line of high rose hedges for at least a quarter of a mile till the lane opened into a wide level farmyard graced by weeping willows that swept down a broad grassy bank to Possum Creek. Except for that one vista, the rest of the view was obscured by hedge roses, breath-of-spring bushes, mock oranges, and crepe myrtles.
Off to the right and still on the last level area before the land begins to slope away stood a large wooden barn built of weathered gray boards. Yellow roses climbed as high as the second-floor windows on one side and twined up over a trellised doorway in the front. Once the barn had sat in a meadow at the edge of cotton fields. Now the fields were grown up in Queen Anne’s lace and brown-eyed Susans, and wild cherries, oaks, sweet gums, and poplars had reclaimed the meadow.
Michael Vickery had converted the barn loft into living quarters the spring Janie died. The ground floor was used as a workshop with a huge kiln out back, and the old wood smokehouse, now a display shop for retail sales, had been salvaged from someone else’s farm halfway across the county.
A Closed sign hung on the door, but Michael’s gray Ford pickup and Denn McCloy’s maroon Volvo were both parked in front of the shop, along with two Japanese imports that probably belonged to their help.
As I pulled into a space next to the truck, a medium-sized dog trotted over, jumped up into the bed of the pickup, and gazed at us with friendly alertness. She was a black-and-tawny brindle, a Lab crossed with Doberman maybe, with a little touch of setter somewhere down the line. Her thin tail whipped the air as she welcomed us. I tapped my horn, countrywise, to signal visitors, and eventually Michael waved from the barn door that he’d be right with us.
Michael Vickery must have been a sore trial to his parents.
To his parents? Hell, he must have a been a sore trial to himself.
Down here where males are men and females are supposed to be their comfort and pleasure, it had to’ve been hard coming to terms with who and what he was. God knows he tried to play the role assigned to him by birth and sex because God also knows (indeed His spokesmen still thunder that message from every evangelical pulpit) that this state’s never been all that tolerant of open homosexuality.
Colleton County ’s no longer as provincial as it used to be. The Triangle’s gay community is too large and too deliberately visible for us to pretend it only exists in California or New York (or even Chapel Hill, long considered Sodom and Gomorrah South by most of the state’s conservatives). Oprah, Phil, and Dr. Ruth are on every television screen, so we even know that one doesn’t willfully choose to be a homosexual. That doesn’t mean that we don’t feel enormous sympathy for a neighbor if that neighbor’s child comes out of the closet, and it doesn’t mean there’s not a lifted eyebrow or salacious derision behind the same neighbor’s back.
Nevertheless, Michael Vickery and Denn McCloy are welcome almost everywhere any other men of their socioeconomic class care to go. They might have trouble putting money down at a cockfight back of redneck tavern, but so would my cousin Reid. They go to church, eat at local barbecue houses, and seem to take part in any of the community activities that interest them. Michael’s on call with the volunteer fire department, for instance, and Denn designs costumes and builds sets for the Possum Creek Players, the county’s little theater group.
Back in the fall of 1972 though, even money and family prominence hadn’t provided the grudging tolerance now given. There’d been midnight drive-bys with drunken yells, hurled bottles, and some poorly aimed shotgun blasts. A couple of better-placed shots from Michael’s Winchester bought him back a little respect, and the night-riding pretty much stopped after Daddy let it be known up at the crossroads store that he didn’t appreciate that kind of ruckus in his neighborhood.
Michael was in his midforties now. He’d studied art at Yale, tried painting in Paris and sculpting in New York, and finally came on back home to Cotton Grove. Maybe he got tired of wondering in alien corn. Not that he’s ever struck me as a professional Southerner. Or an overly effete artist either. When he first came home to stay, it soon got around that he was going to dig clay out of the banks of Possum Creek and make ceramic statues. No one
