We came up the steps beside the fenced-in play yard of a church-sponsored daycare center. Under the watchful eye of two white women, little children were swinging, playing in the sandbox, hanging from monkey bars—black kids, white kids, even a couple of kids of Asian descent.
Surely it was going to be different for them?
11
Next day, Friday, things were a little quieter. Ed and his people had nothing to say on record, the television cameras and reporters drifted back to Raleigh, the county commissioners were talking about appointing an interracial task force, and Wallace Adderly had been invited (invited himself?) to speak at the interchurch fellowship meeting that was still scheduled for Sunday at Mount Olive.
My calendar was so light that I was finished by two, which suited me just fine. I didn’t want to be anywhere around when A.K. checked into jail at six. Andrew, who actually spent a night or three in the old jail back when he was doggedly climbing Fool’s Hill himself, had sounded stoical when I called last night, but April’s seen too many prison movies. She was terrified that A.K. was going to be raped or beaten up and nothing I said could convince her that things like that didn’t happen in our new jailhouse.
For all I knew, she was probably planning to come along and camp out in Gwen Utley’s office for the whole forty-eight hours. Gwen’s one of our magistrates and her door’s on the same basement hallway as the jail. Gwen’s pretty no-nonsense though, so maybe she could reassure April.
On the way out of town, I stopped past Aunt Zell’s where I’ve lived for the last few years and changed into sneakers, a faded red cotton T- shirt and my favorite pair of cutoffs. A baseball cap and work gloves and I was ready to head out to the farm to see what the builders had done since I last had a chance to look.
My brother Adam out in California had sent me a book with several passive solar house plans and the modest one I’d picked had a concrete slab floor, steel framing, a tiny sunroom and a couple of strategically placed masonry walls to store heat in cold weather. South-facing windows would catch the low winter sun, while the eaves were angled to block most of the higher summer sun. A trellis of wisteria would help shade the south side until the trees got taller, and extra thick insulation would cut down on both heating and cooling costs without adding too much to the overall building cost.
The two solar collectors on the roof and the hot water tank were a bigger investment, but I liked the idea of letting the sun heat my water from March till November.
“And if you’d ante up another ten or fifteen thou, you could go totally off-grid,” Adam says, e-mailing me diagrams and figures about storage batteries, photovoltaics, and Swedish refrigerators. This from a man who enjoys the Silicon Valley lifestyle in a seven-thousand-square-foot house.
“Hey, I use solar energy to heat the pool,” he says indignantly.
It was another hot and sticky day here in eastern North Carolina, but I kept my car windows down and the air conditioner off. If I hoped to do any work on the house, it would seem even hotter to step out of a cool car into ninety-two degrees.
A church sign on the way out of town read
Okay.
Churches have always had signs, of course. Usually they’re dignified brick boxes neatly lettered on either side with the name of the pastor and the hours of service. In the last few years though, the brick boxes started having a little glass door on either side and a signboard inside that spells out exhortational messages with changeable letters.
Or else the pastors use one of those portable signs on wheels, the kind that usually have a big red arrow pointing to a used car sale: “All prices slashed!!”
Not all the church messages make good sense—especially when some of the letters fall off and you have to guess at the original wording.
Portland Brewer and I recently saw one where the letters were so scrambled that it looked as if the sign was speaking in tongues.
In front of a Pentecostal church.
True story.
When I got to the King homeplace, I turned in at the long sweeping driveway that led up to the house past newly planted baby azalea bushes that would someday grow into head-high masses of pink and white.
Aunt Zell’s irises had been spectacular at Easter—like stalks of white orchids, six or seven blossoms to the stalk—but they needed dividing again and she’d already given some to every gardener she could think of. Then she remembered that Mrs. Avery’s mother used to have white irises growing in her dooryard, “so I called Grace King Avery and she was thrilled because her brother didn’t care anything about the gardens. Just let them go. I said I’d send her some divisions at first passing and as long as you’re going right by her door…”
As I drove around to the back (no matter how splendid the front door on a country dwelling, few people use it), I was glad that I’d opted for a new house instead of going Grace King Avery’s route. There’s nothing more beautiful than a gracious old farmhouse lovingly restored, but they’re black holes when it comes to time and money. I hate to think how many gallons of paint it took to cover all the turned railings and gingerbread on the front and side porches alone.
Raymond Bagwell was hard at it with a shovel when I rolled to a stop. Stripped to his skinny waist, he was digging up a four-by-twenty length of sunbaked dirt that was probably going to be Mrs. Avery’s restored perennial border.
“Raymond, right?” I asked as I got out of the car.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said warily.
“I’m A.K.’s aunt.”
“The judge?” He paused in his digging and gave my ball cap a skeptical look.
