small plot of ground about twenty-five feet square. The truck was fitted with a hydraulic winch to hoist slabs of marble and granite in and out of the truck’s bed.
“You ever meet Rudy Peacock before?” Daddy asked as a man rose from his seat on the wall.
“Not that I remember,” I said.
“His granddaddy made my daddy’s stone and his daddy and him did Annie Ruth’s and your mama’s stone, too.”
My grandfather Knott’s “stone” was a ten-foot-tall black marble obelisk, erected shortly after he crashed and drowned in Possum Creek. Revenuers shot out his truck tires when he tried to outrun them with a load of his homemade whiskey. From all accounts, my grandfather was a good-hearted family man who turned to moonshining when boll weevils destroyed the cotton farms around here. It was the only way he knew to feed and clothe his extended family and pay the taxes on his little piece of land.
Daddy was barely in his teens when he became the man of the house, and defiant pride had reared that costly shaft to his father’s memory long before my birth. Same with his first wife’s marker, too, of course.
I probably would have met the Peacocks, father and son, when they came out to set Mother’s white marble stone except that I was in full flight by then—mad at Daddy, mad at my brothers, mad at God—so mad that I stayed gone for two years.
“Rudy’s right shy with women,” Daddy warned as we pulled up to the big truck. “Try not to scare him.”
Scare him?
The man now leaning against the truck’s front fender was tall as Daddy, but so broad and muscular you could’ve fit two Kezzie Knotts into one Rudy Peacock’s chinos and black T-shirt. Peacock’s hair was granite gray and his arms were roped with veins that stood out against the muscles. He nodded politely when we were introduced, but he didn’t put out his hand, his eyes didn’t quite meet mine, and he soon moved back so that Daddy was a buffer between us.
Ordinarily, I’d have asked if he was the father of a Peacock girl who’d been a year or two ahead of me in high school, but he was clearly so uncomfortable that I was ready to fade into the background.
Not Daddy, though. He’s always had a broad streak of mischief in him.
“Deb’rah’s gonna need your vote again come election time,” he said. “And won’t some of your girls in school with her? What was their names, shug?”
“Now you didn’t drag Mr. Peacock out here to get his vote or talk about my high school days,” I said, and opened the wide iron gate set in the stone wall.
The damage was apparent as soon as I stepped inside and it shamed and angered me that any nephew of mine had a hand in this. I can understand teenage boys buying beer illegally. I can understand why they’d come back here, well off the road and out of casual view, to drink it in the moonlight and strew the cans around. But to then start pushing over headstones? To come armed with a can of spray paint?
The need to smash and deface I do not understand.
I hadn’t closely scrutinized the Polaroid pictures of the damage that Cyl DeGraffenried had introduced as evidence that afternoon. Mrs. Avery had picked them up, but under her disapproving eye, I had given them only a cursory, embarrassed glance. Now that I was here and could see all the girls’ names printed in dark green across the stones and wall, I realized that A.K. had probably been telling the truth when he swore he hadn’t used the spray can.
One hand had printed every S and every N backwards. A different hand had mixed his capitals with lowercase, then dotted each capital I. And while Andrew’s son might have written his letters that way, April’s son had been taught to print his alphabet perfectly long before he started kindergarten.
I’ve heard SBI handwriting experts say it’s almost as hard for an educated person to mimic a crude writing style as it is for an uneducated person to mimic a correct style. Both groups almost always revert to true form somewhere in the document. I was pretty sure A.K. couldn’t have written those backward letters that consistently. Especially not after three or four beers.
But he’d certainly had a hand in tipping over half a dozen headstones and pulling over the angel.
“No real damage to the markers,” said Mr. Peacock after he’d walked around the little graveyard. “I can stand ’em back up, reseat them with a little mortar and they’ll be fine as new once that latex paint’s scrubbed off. Good thing they won’t using oil-base.”
“What about that there angel?” asked Daddy.
She was granite, not marble, about five feet tall, and she had fallen back at an angle. One wing was half-buried in the soft sandy loam, but the right wing had struck the stone wall and shattered into several chunks.
“Now that’s gonna take some work,” said Mr. Peacock, stroking his broad chin. “I gotta be honest with you, Mr. Kezzie. It’s gonna cost. First I’ve got to see if what’s left of that wing can take drilling.”
“Drilling?” I asked.
He was so absorbed in the mechanics he forgot to be shy and actually met my eyes for a brief instant. “I’ll have to put in at least two steel pins to hold the new wing tip on. Then if it’s sound enough to accept the pins, I’ve got to see if I can match the color. Every stone’s a little different, you know.”
He bent down for a chunk of the broken wing that must have weighed at least fifteen pounds and hefted it in one huge hand as if it were a two-pound sack of flour. The sun had already set and daylight was fading, but we could still see the color difference between the granite’s weathered surface and its freshly split interior.
His hands looked like boot leather but his touch was delicate as his fingers gently traced the feathers chiseled on the broken stone he held, as if he were smoothing real feathers instead of granite.
“And after I match the stone, I’ve got to carve the feathers so they match, too.”
“And if the pins won’t hold or you can’t match it?” asked Daddy.
“Then we’ll have to make a whole new pair of wings and pin ’em on back behind the shoulder blades. By the time I give her a good buffing all over and bring her back and stand her up, they ought to look all right, but it’s
