HANDSCREW AND C-CLAMPS
I probably could have borrowed a change of clothes from Annie Sue, but I'd still have to hitch a ride back with Deputy Richards to pick up my car; so I had her drive me home. She came upstairs with me, a stolid young woman who grew up in the tobacco fields near Fayetteville and who was not inclined to be too chatty with a judge that her immediate boss treated like a younger sister. After a few of her yes-ma'am, no-ma'am answers, I quit trying to put her at ease.
She took my bloodstained skirt and my soiled but unsplattered shirt and put them in a brown paper bag separate from Annie Sue's things.
'I'll just wait out in the car for you, ma'am.'
'Be right with you,' I promised. Stripped down to a white silk teddy, I stood barefoot in front of my closet and flipped through the hangers for fresh clothes. What's appropriate for a murder scene? I slipped a scoop-necked black cotton knit over my head and pulled a pair of old jeans over my hips. This time I meant to be ready for mud or blood.
Aunt Zell came in as I finished tying the laces on my raggedyest pair of sneakers. She had the puppy in her arms and was feeding it with its nursing bottle. 'Ash wants to know how come there's a sheriff's car parked in our drive.'
'We're just leaving,' I said lightly. 'She's going to drop me off to pick up my car.'
After Mother died and Daddy went back to the farm, I moved into these two rooms that once belonged to Uncle Ash's father. Daddy and I weren't getting along too well then, and Uncle Ash was on the road even more in those days, so it seemed a sensible solution all around.
No kitchen, but otherwise it's like a self-contained apartment: sitting room, bath, and a large bedroom that opens onto the upstairs back veranda. There's even a side entrance and a second staircase, so I can come and go in private if I wish.
I've lived here off and on ever since that eighteenth summer, so Aunt Zell knows me about as well as anybody. Normally she's enough like my mother to enjoy stringing me along just to see how far I'll go before I tell the whole truth. Tonight she wasn't playing, and the lines in her face were deeper than I'd seen them in a long time, as the puppy nursed with little snorts and grunts.
'How'd you hear?' I asked. 'The family tom-toms been working overtime?'
She shifted the puppy to a more comfortable position so that he could drain the bottle. 'Ruth called Andrew from Herman's house. That odious creature's dead?'
I nodded.
'Are A.K. and Reese involved?'
'Is that what Andrew's afraid of? He doesn't have to worry. Honest. If any of us are in trouble, it's probably me.'
In twenty-five words or less, I hastily explained how Dwight was pretty sure Bannerman was already dead when I found Annie Sue, and how we expected to find my fingerprints on the hammer that killed him, and how it'd all happened at least an hour before Reese and A.K. even heard about the incident.
She pushed my pillows up on the headboard and leaned back against them. The puppy, his fat little tummy thoroughly full again, nuzzled into the sleeve of her robe and went sound to sleep. As I talked, Aunt Zell stroked the pup's silky hair and relief smoothed away some of the tension between her eyes.
'Would you please call your brother and tell him that?'
Like Mother, she always did have a tender heart for him. * * *
Andrew was one of the wild ones who came along during the Depression years when things got a touch rough around here. I've never known all the details of that period. Somehow it seemed a little disloyal to Mother to ask too many questions about Daddy's first wife. She was from that swampy area where Possum Creek runs into the Neuse River, much more of a backwoods in those days than now, but the land was just as sorry—'no good for nothing 'cept keeping the world stuck together right yonder'—and the people there just as suspicious of outsiders and revenuers.
Her people were dirt poor and nearly illiterate and they made her quit school in the sixth grade and set her running trot lines and boiling mash when she wasn't picking cotton for two cents a pound like the rest of her family. No wonder she married Daddy when she was fifteen and started kicking out baby boys every two years regular as clockwork. A man who owns his own land never has to let his family go hungry long as seeds sprout and hogs can be fattened, but fresh vegetables and cured hams couldn't always be traded for boys' shoes or a widowed mother's medicine. I expect that's why Daddy kept on running his own shine. It was his only dependable source of cash money.
Was it a good marriage?
I don't know.
They say she was certainly a good helpmeet. When the revenuers came sniffing around local stores to see who was buying up lots of sugar, they say it was her idea to visit every grocery store in Raleigh, Wilson, Goldsboro and Fayetteville three or four times a summer, never buying more than twenty-five or thirty pounds of sugar at a time. 'And better let me have some of them big canning jars. Looks like it's gonna be a good summer for blackberries/cherries/peaches/pears. These young'uns shore do love my [insert one] preserves.'
And every other year, here came another son to help with the plowing when Daddy starting buying up farms that were going under. Poor Andrew didn't get his turn as knee baby because the next lying-in brought twins, Herman and Haywood, and their mother's lap wasn't big enough to hold two infants and a toddler. He was only seven when she died of childbirth fever after birthing Jack, and Daddy remarried within the year.
Mother gentled the twins and the younger boys, but the older ones never did completely tame and seems like Andrew was worst of all. I don't think they ever resented her, they just couldn't get used to a woman who made Daddy turn loose some of his money and fix up the old farmhouse with paint and wallpaper. She brought her own
