When G. Hooks needed to stand the grasshopper in a corner, this little piece of land he’d inherited through his mother’s side was the corner he chose. Gray Talbert raised a lot of hell at first, then, to everybody’s surprise, he seemed to settle right down. Repaired the greenhouses. Started a profitable nursery.
According to Daddy, who twisted a knot in G. Hooks’s tail over that nursery, it’s totally legitimate these days, if maybe not quite as profitable as back when Gray was running it unsupervised.
Nevertheless, I was glad when Kidd stuck his head out the window again, heard the dogs, and said they’d veered off to the east. We doubled back along a lane that followed the creek bank and soon passed the iron stake that marked the corner between our land, G. Hooks’s, and Mr. Jap’s. One of those ubiquitous orange plastic ribbons was tied around the stake and the loose ends fluttered in the breeze.
Kidd slowed down to a crawl when he saw me twist around to stare out the back window. “Something wrong?”
“Just wondering who’s surveying what,” I said.
Sighting back along the Talbert line, I could see more orange ribbons tied to a distant tree at the edge of the creek bank.
“My daddy has a standing offer to buy this piece of land, but G. Hooks would dig up the whole forty-six acres and ship it to China before he’d let Daddy have a square inch. If he’s getting ready to sell, you can take it to the bank that he’s found a buyer he thinks’ll give Daddy grief.”
“Why should your dad care who Talbert sells to?” asked Kidd. “He’s already got a mile-wide buffer around his house.”
An exaggeration, but not by much.
Daddy’s always happiest when he can put a little more land between himself and the outside world and he’s been adding to it ever since he was a boy of fifteen. He and my brothers own at least twenty-five hundred acres between them. A hundred or so of those acres are mine.
Some people spend money on fancy cars and lavish houses or expensive toys. We Knotts like to put our spare change in land. As Daddy always reminds us, it’s not like God’s making any more of it.
We cleared the trees and there, blocking the lane, was a shabby black two-ton farm truck with bald tires and homemade wooden sides to the flatbed. A wiry young white man in blue jeans, a faded red T-shirt, and a green John Deere cap leaned against one of the fenders as he talked with Mr. Jap. Beside the lane was a nice patch of bright orange pumpkins that looked big enough to harvest even though the vines were still green.
I hadn’t seen Mr. Jap since the funeral, so I motioned for Kidd to stop and got out to say hey.
He looked old and frail standing there with the sun beating down, as if Dallas’s death had drained off ten years of energy, and he didn’t seem to place me till I mentioned Daddy, introduced Kidd, and explained why we were there.
Then he smiled and said, “Oh, yeah. A pair of hounds went streaking past here about two minutes ago. I wouldn’t be surprised but what that rabbit’s holed up down yonder at the sheds. You just go ahead, but try not to run over no pumpkins if you can help it.”
“I’m glad you reminded me,” I told him, “because Aunt Zell asked me to bring her a dozen ears of your corn if I was out here before Halloween.”
Mr. Jap was never much of a farmer, not even in tobacco’s glory days. He so preferred working on cars that he rented out his acreage and even let some of his fallow fields go back to nature. A few years ago, though, when the influx of new people started and those newcomers couldn’t seem to get enough of the ornamental corn he brought to the crossroads flea market, Mr. Jap planted a couple of acres so he could pay for his winter heating oil. Now, to my surprise, he seemed to be in farming with both feet. Except for that small pumpkin patch, the whole back side of his farm was covered with broken stalks and culled ears.
“Billy here picked it last month and it’s stored in that barn back of Dallas’s house.”
Mr. Jap had always grown a strain that he swore had been handed straight down from a great-great- grandmother who befriended an Indian woman who gave her some seed stock in return. The colorful red, black, orange, and yellow ears were small and perfectly shaped, “and them fools over’n Cary and North Raleigh’ll hang it on anything that opens or closes,” he told Daddy gleefully. “Hell, they even buy corn shocks and hay bales and stick ’em all over them fancy yards they got.”
He’d shaken his head at the folly of city folks, but he was happy to take their cash. And was evidently eager for more.
“Billy here and me go halves on it,” Mr. Jap told us now, which explained the larger crop.
“Billy Wall?” I asked the young man. “Troy Wall’s boy?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said shyly.
“I didn’t know your daddy farmed.”
“He don’t. But I’ve always wanted to ever since I was a little boy.”
Troy Wall had been five or six years ahead of me in school and this boy, about twenty I’d say, was his spitting image. “What’s your dad up to these days?” I asked.
“Oh, not much. He lays floor tile for Carpet Country when his back don’t act up on him. They got the contract to do all the houses in Mr. Sutterly’s new subdivision over on New Forty-Eight.”
Dick Sutterly was the developer who’d tried to buy the farm from Dallas.
Mr. Jap dropped his cigarette, ground it out with the toe of his brogan. “That’s the old Holland homeplace,” he said. “Used to be one of the prettiest farms around, yes, it was. And James Holland always had the best yield of sweet potatoes of any man in the township. It’s a downright sin to put houses on such mellow land.”
“Been mine, I’d have never sold it,” Billy said wistfully.
“Well, everybody ain’t as willing to work as hard as you, boy. No, they ain’t.” Mr. Jap shook his head. “I reckon some folks would sell their soul if you offered ’em enough.”
