timid little churchgoing lady half engaged to a deacon’s son, and how he’d made the deacon’s son back off and leave the field to him. “And Jap might not’ve quit all his bragging and drinking and cussing out in the shop, but he always remembered that Elsie was a lady and he never brought it indoors nor let Dallas bring it in the house neither. Merrilee’s a lot like her Aunt Elsie, the way she’s settled that Grimes boy.”
“It’s a wonder they never got caught driving drunk, what with all the drinking they did,” Adam said provocatively.
But if he was hoping to get Daddy to talk about the bootlegging days, he didn’t have any more luck than I had with Mr. Jap selling land. Daddy just sat there in front of the wood heater with his hands around his coffee mug and his long legs stretched out to the warmth and a sad smile on his lips as he remembered whatever he remembered.
Eventually, and over their protests, I stood to go back to Dobbs.
“The soup smells wonderful,” I said as Daddy pressed me to stay to supper and Maidie promised there was plenty for everybody, “but Aunt Zell was going to start on her fruitcakes this evening and she’ll be waiting for the pecans.”
Maidie took a gallon bag of shelled nuts from the freezer and put them in a paper bag for me.
“And, Cletus, would you get her a bottle of that—gin, is it?” Daddy asked slyly. “Wouldn’t be Zell’s fruitcake without some gin.”
The bottle Cletus took from beneath the sink had a Gilbey’s label and a broken tax seal, but if I took a sniff, I would not expect to smell juniper berries. A faint aroma of apples or peaches, maybe, but not juniper berries.
Maidie and I rolled our eyes at each other, but Aunt Zell would be disappointed if her fruitcakes had to do without their usual drenching of homemade brandy.
I asked Adam if he wanted to catch a movie somewhere, but he yawned and said all this fresh air was getting to him. “I think I’ll make it an early evening since I promised Herman and Nadine that I’d go to their church with them tomorrow morning.”
“Better you than me,” I said cattily. “Their minister’s a chauvinistic born-again who gets so tangled up in his own rhetoric that it’s sometimes hard to tell if he’s proved his point or the devil’s.”
“Deborah Knott, you be ashamed of yourself!” Maidie scolded. A preacher is a preacher is a preacher to her, but Cletus gave me a wink and a grin.
Daddy walked out to my car with me to remind me that North Carolina law requires that open containers of alcoholic beverages be transported in the trunk. (He’s an authority on those laws.)
Once the bottle was properly stowed next to my toolbox, he whistled up the dogs. They came running through the late afternoon sunshine, Hambone trotting along after them. I opened the car door and the pup hopped right up on the front seat. As I stood on tiptoe to kiss Daddy’s leathery, wind-chilled cheek, he gave me a hug.
“You take care of yourself, now.”
“I will,” I promised, sliding in after Hambone. “You, too.”
He gave me an ironic smile that said he knew how we were starting to worry about him. And then, just as he used to say when I was a very little girl, “Don’t you fret yourself, shug. I ain’t gonna die till you’re an old, old lady.”
Now, as then, the words still made me smile. Never mind that when I was very little, thirty-six seemed old, old.
I started to switch on the engine when Daddy rapped at my window.
“Almost forgot to tell you,” he said. “Dwight said for you to call him when you get back to Dobbs.”
There was a sheepish look on his face that I couldn’t quite interpret.
15
« ^ »
I drove back to Dobbs with a zillion questions tumbling through my mind.
Like (1): was G. Hooks that good a poker face or did he have alternative options?
Like (2): was Adam really tired or was he just not anxious for more questions about his two-point-nine acres of road frontage?
Like (3): were (1) and (2) linked?
And then there were (4), (5), (6), and (7): what was Daddy up to? Where was Allen? What did Dwight want? And who
“
“Mind your own business,” I told him.
The cold orange rays of the setting sun were nearly horizontal to the earth as I approached the edge of town. When I was a child, the town was more compact and tobacco farms began two blocks after the last stoplight. Now, with cars and the need for spaces to park them, every major road was strip-malled for two miles out with gas stations, convenience stores, video rental shops, fast food drive-throughs and grocery stores. Many of the stores were already boarded up and derelict. It reminds me of the slash-and-burn practices we so deplore in the Amazon rain forests: build a big ugly chain store, suck out all the quick money you can, then abandon that store and go build another where the action’s hotter.
